Whole Earth Living – Reconnecting Earth, History, Body and Mind
Listen
Read More
This book is a hopeful one. After establishing the losses, it suggests that there are fundamental re-orientations that humans as individuals and members of society can make that are more hopeful and more meaningful than some of the current formulations offered for a sustainable future. Instead of renouncing aspects of our lives, we can return to some forms of self-sufficiency (gardening, sewing, woodworking, for example) individually, within households and communities in order to receive positive benefits, such as reducing disease and isolation.
Pages: 208 pages
Publishing Date: September 2020
Dimensions: 13.5 x 21 cm
Type: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-913680-01-5
Category: Non-Fiction
£18.99
13 in stock
Read More
This book is a hopeful one. After establishing the losses, it suggests that there are fundamental re-orientations that humans as individuals and members of society can make that are more hopeful and more meaningful than some of the current formulations offered for a sustainable future. Instead of renouncing aspects of our lives, we can return to some forms of self-sufficiency (gardening, sewing, woodworking, for example) individually, within households and communities in order to receive positive benefits, such as reducing disease and isolation.
Pages: 208 pages
Publishing Date: September 2020
Dimensions: 13.5 x 21 cm
Type: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-913680-01-5
Category: Non-Fiction
Author:
Connect with the Author:
About the Author:
Kathleen Smythe reads, writes, teaches, gardens, bikes, and hikes, most of the time not far from her home in Cincinnati, Ohio. She is a professor of sustainability at Xavier University (a Jesuit, Catholic school) and appreciates the strong recent Jesuit commitment to caring for our common home. She is the mother of two children whom she enjoys learning from. Her Ph.D. is in African History and that background is reflected in all of her teaching and writing, as the radical inequalities of today’s globalized world as well as the rich and diverse traditions of African peoples are a source of motivation and inspiration. She is passionate about food and agriculture and works on a local farm as a member of a Community Supported Agriculture program. She has also designed a bicycling history course that introduces students to the multi-layered history of the Cincinnati region. One of the many goals of the course is to help students fall in love with the city.
Praise:
“If we are to take full advantage of the chance for a planetary reset that the COVID-19 pandemic affords us, Kathleen Smythe’s deep dive into our genetic and cultural inheritance is a good place to start. Smythe’s analysis of the role of feet and hands in human evolution alone is worth the price of the book and can change your life. Even more important is her proposal for an education geared to homecoming. Focused on socially useful work and community resilience, Smythe’s case for place-based, experiential learning will produce ecologically informed citizens who will help us save our world.”
—John D. Fairfield, Professor of History at Xavier University
Kathleen Smythe’s Whole Earth Living combines scholarship and personal experience, analysis and activism, thinking and feeling—the kind of thoughtful work we need from universities today. With a historian’s deep sense of history, Smythe honestly faces the crises—social and ecological—that define our world and offers a framework for thinking about a way back into our bodies and to the earth. This is a book that is both bracing and tender, as Smythe finds ways to deal with harsh realities that are restorative. Whole Earth Living is recommended reading for those of us in industrial societies who are searching for more engaged ways to live today that can help create more options for the future.
—Robert Jensen, Emeritus Professor, University of Texas at Austin, author of Plain Radical: Living, Loving, and Learning to Leave the Planet Gracefully
Kathleen Smythe’s Whole Earth Living is a much-needed book at this major junction point in human history. Her hopes are no less bold than restoring the value that has been lost from human lives in a cloud of technological gadgetry and achieving a robust mode of sustainability that embraces pan-species flourishing.
Smythe brings her rich historical understanding of agriculture, technology, and politics to explore how humanity has lost its way. And, beyond this critique of modern humanity’s rocky path, she presents a vision for what meaningful work and meaningful lives could and should look like, now and in the future, with a style that is at once highly readable and persuasive. “We need to look differently at who humans were, and who we are now,” Smythe writes, cutting to the nub of the issue. “Then we might be able to achieve the cultural change that could overturn the dominant understanding of our relationship to nature.”
While the book draws on the authors’ experience of living in the United States, as well as Africa, the issues discussed, and their potential ramifications, will be relevant to any citizen of a country whose government is currently paving an unsustainable path into a hostile future. And, as Smythe argues, changes are possible. “Such changes are not cumbersome, depressing, or impossible,” she writes. Instead, they are “realistic, hope-filled, and a more honest reflection of where we have come from and who we might be as a species.”
Smythe’s excellent book holds the potential to help ensure humanity takes the right path at the junction point.
—Joe Gray, Associate Editor, The Ecological Citizen; Author of Thirteen Paces by Four
Reviews