App Store

Google Play

{{seriesTitle}} - The book series

Details page - Device banner - 894x1036

Step into an infinite world of stories

Listen and read

Jack R. Baker

Jeffrey Bilbro

Why the university should focus on community: “An enlightening interpretation of Wendell Berry’s philosophy for the pursuit of a holistic higher education.” —Publishers Weekly

Prominent author and cultural critic Wendell Berry is well known for his contributions to agrarianism and environmentalism, but his commentary on education has received comparatively little attention. Yet Berry has been eloquently unmasking America’s cultural obsession with restless mobility for decades, arguing that it causes damage to both the land and the character of our communities. The education system, he maintains, plays a central role in this obsession, inculcating in students’ minds the American dream of moving up and moving on.

Drawing on Berry’s essays, fiction, and poetry, Jack R. Baker and Jeffrey Bilbro illuminate the influential thinker’s vision for higher education in this path-breaking study. Each chapter begins with an examination of one of Berry’s fictional narratives and then goes on to consider how the passage inspires new ways of thinking about the university’s mission. Throughout, Baker and Bilbro argue that instead of training students to live in their careers, universities should educate students to inhabit and serve their places. The authors also offer practical suggestions for how students, teachers, and administrators might begin implementing these ideas.

Baker and Bilbro conclude that institutions guided by Berry’s vision might cultivate citizens who can begin the work of healing their communities—graduates who have been educated for responsible membership in a family, a community, or a polity.

The University Press of Kentucky

Culture of the Land

Wendell Berry and Higher Education: Cultivating Virtues of Place

Vandana Shiva

The pioneering environmental activist presents her most influential writings—with an informative introduction by Wendell Berry.

Motivated by agricultural devastation in her home country of India, Vandana Shiva became one of the world's most influential environmental and anti-globalization activists. Her groundbreaking research has exposed the destructive effects of monocultures and commercial agriculture and revealed the links between ecology, gender, and poverty.

In The Vandana Shiva Reader, Shiva assembles her most influential writings, combining trenchant critiques of the corporate monopolization of agriculture with a powerful defense of biodiversity and food democracy. This essential collection demonstrates the full range of Shiva's research and activism, from her condemnation of commercial seed technology, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and the international agriculture industry's dependence on fossil fuels, to her tireless documentation of the extensive human costs of ecological deterioration.

This important volume illuminates Shiva's profound understanding of both the perils and potential of our interconnected world and calls on citizens of all nations to renew their commitment to love and care for soil, seeds, and people.

The Vandana Shiva Reader

Gary Holthaus

A portrait of the realities of agricultural life in today’s world, based on interviews with more than forty farm families.
 
 In this book, dozens of farm families from America’s heartland detail the practices and values that relate to their land, work, and communities. Their stories reveal that those who make their living in agriculture—despite stereotypes of provincialism perpetuated by the media—are savvy to the influence of world politics on local issues.
 
 Gary Holthaus demonstrates how outside economic, governmental, legal, and business developments play an increasingly influential, if not controlling, role in every farmer’s life. The swift approval of genetically modified crops by the federal government, the formation of huge agricultural conglomerates, and the devastating environmental effects of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides are just a few issues buffeting family farms. From the Farm to the Table explores farmers’ experiences to offer a deeper understanding of how we can create sustainable and vibrant land-based communities by adhering to fundamental agrarian values.
 
 “Tells the story of modern agriculture through engaging interviews with men and women who make a living farming in southeastern Minnesota. In a tone reminiscent of Wendell Berry’s A Place on Earth, he examines the far-reaching effects of genetically modified organisms, free-trade agreements that nurture ‘transnational corporate profit,’ dependence on fossil fuel-derived chemicals, and the toll all this has taken on the land and farmers.” —Library Journal

From the Farm to the Table: What All Americans Need to Know about Agriculture

Frederick L. Kirschenmann

“[A] superb collection of essays . . . one of the wisest, sanest, most practical, and most trusted voices in the movement to reform the American food system.” —Michael Pollan, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of This is Your Mind on Plants

Theologian, academic, and third-generation organic farmer Frederick L. Kirschenmann is a celebrated agricultural thinker who has tirelessly promoted the principles of sustainability for three decades. Cultivating an Ecological Conscience documents Kirschenmann’s evolution and his lifelong contributions to the new agrarianism in a collection of his greatest writings on farming, philosophy, and sustainability.

Working closely with agricultural economist and editor Constance L. Falk, Kirschenmann recounts his intellectual and spiritual journey. In a unique blend of personal history, philosophical discourse, spiritual ruminations, and practical advice, Kirschenmann interweaves his insights with discussion of contemporary agrarian topics. This collection serves as an invaluable resource to agrarian scholars and introduces readers to an agricultural pioneer whose work has profoundly influenced modern thinking about food.

“We’re past the moment when agriculture was something we could forget about?in a warming world, there's no more crucial topic, and here's the short course in how to think about it!” —Bill McKibben, author of Falter

Cultivating an Ecological Conscience: Essays from a Farmer Philosopher

Matthew Dickerson

David O'Hara

An exploration of the Chronicles of Narnia and the Space Trilogy that “enriches our understanding of how to care for our world” (Alan Jacobs, author of Breaking Bread with the Dead).
 
 In Narnia and the Fields of Arbol: The Environmental Vision of C. S. Lewis, authors Matthew Dickerson and David O’Hara illuminate an important yet overlooked aspect of the author’s visionary work. They go beyond traditional theological discussions of Lewis’s writing to investigate themes of sustainability, stewardship of natural resources, and humanity’s relationship to wilderness. The authors examine the environmental and ecological underpinnings of Lewis’s work by exploring his best-known works of fantasy, including the seven books of the Chronicles of Narnia and the three novels collectively referred to as the Space Trilogy. Taken together, these works reveal Lewis’s enduring environmental concerns, and Dickerson and O’Hara offer a new understanding of his pioneering style of fiction.
 
Narnia and the Fields of Arbol, the first book-length work on the subject, finds the author’s legacy to have as much in common with the agrarian environmentalism of Wendell Berry as it does with the fantasy of J. R. R. Tolkien. In an era of increasing concern about deforestation, climate change, and other environmental issues, Lewis’s work remains as pertinent as ever. The widespread adaption of his work in film lends credence to the author’s staying power as an influential voice in both fantastical fiction and environmental literature. With Narnia and the Fields of Arbol, Dickerson and O'Hara have written a timely work of scholarship that offers a fresh perspective on one of the most celebrated authors in literary history.
 
 “Both revelatory and a pleasure to read.” —Robert Siegel, award-winning author of The Whalesong Trilogy

Narnia and the Fields of Arbol: The Environmental Vision of C.S. Lewis

A portrait of an American thinker with contributions by Barbara Kingsolver, Bill McKibben, Sven Birkerts, Wes Jackson, and more: “A masterful collection.” —Charlotte Observer

Essayist, social critic, poet, “mad farmer,” novelist, teacher, and prophet: Wendell Berry has been called many things, but the broad sweep of his contemporary relevance and influence defies facile labels. With a unique perspective and far-reaching vision, Berry poses complex questions about humankind and our relationship to the land and offers simple but profound solutions. Berry’s writings give voice to a provocative but consistent philosophy that extends far beyond its agrarian core to include elements of sociology, the natural sciences, politics, religion, philosophy, linguistics, agriculture, and other seemingly incompatible fields of study.

Wendell Berry: Life and Work examines this wise, original thinker, appraising his written work and exploring his influence as an activist and artist. Each of the contributors—including Hayden Carruth, Sven Birkerts, Barbara Kingsolver, Stanley Hauerwas, Donald Hall, Ed McClanahan, Bill McKibben, Scott Russell Sanders, Norman Wirzba, Wes Jackson, and Eric T. Freyfogle—examines an aspect of Berry’s varied yet cohesive body of work. Also included are highly personal glimpses of Berry: his career, academic influence, and unconventional lifestyle.

These deft sketches show the purity of Berry’s agrarian lifestyle and demonstrate that there is nothing simple about the life to which he’s devoted himself. He embraces a life that sustains him not by easy purchase and haste but by physical labor and patience, not by mindless acquiescence to a centralized economy but by attention to local ways and wisdom. This book combines biographical sketches, personal accounts, literary criticism, and social commentary. The result is a rich portrait of one of America’s most profound and honest thinkers.

Wendell Berry: Life and Work

Jonathan Evans

“A fascinating ecocritical evaluation” of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion and other works of the master fantasist (Northeastern Naturalist).
 
The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion are rarely considered to be works of environmental literature or mentioned together with such authors as John Muir, Rachel Carson, or Aldo Leopold. Nonetheless, Tolkien’s vision of nature is as passionate and has had as profound an influence on his readers as that of many contemporary environmental writers. The burgeoning field of agrarianism provides new insights into Tolkien’s view of the natural world and environmental responsibility. In Ents, Elves, and Eriador, Matthew Dickerson and Jonathan Evans show how Tolkien anticipated some of the tenets of modern environmentalism in the imagined world of Middle-earth and the races with which it is peopled.
 
 Dickerson and Evans examine Tolkien’s major works as well as his lesser-known stories and essays, comparing his writing to that of the most important naturalists of the past century. A vital contribution to environmental literature and an essential addition to Tolkien scholarship, Ents, Elves, and Eriador offers both Tolkien fans and environmentalists an understanding of Middle-earth that has profound implications for environmental stewardship in the present and the future of our own world.
 
 “This book is for everyone who loves the work of J. R. R. Tolkien, and who loves the world around them.” —Armchair Interviews
 
 “Anyone who ever thrilled to Tolkien’s fighting trees, or to the earthy Tom Bombadil, or to the novel charm of the Shire will want to read this important and lovely book.” —Bill McKibben, Scholar in Residence in Environmental Studies, Middlebury College

Culture of the Land - The book series

Culture of the Land - The book series

Culture of the Land books in order

Listen and read