Renewing Earth

Auteur

KELSEY TIMMERMAN is the New York Times bestselling author of Where Am I Wearing, **Where Am I Eating? and Where Am I Giving?. A champion of global thinking and local action, he regularly speaks at universities, colleges, and high schools all over the U.S. He is also the co-founder of The Facing Project, a non-profit community storytelling initiative in nearly 100 communities across the country.

Texte du rabat

A Global Adventure to Meet the Farmers, Activists, and Indigenous People

Growing the Roots of a Regenerative Future

There’s no denying it: we treat our planet like dirt. Humanity’s impact has become a geologic force changing the climate and threatening oceans, glaciers, and the lands that feed us.

Living in rural Indiana, author Kelsey Timmerman witnesses first hand the damage modern industrial agriculture has done to our land and our communities. He’s afraid to let his kids swim in the nearby pond filled with farm runoff. There are times, after chicken manure has been spread on the surrounding fields, that it’s hard to breathe.

Timmerman recognizes that farming – the occupation of his family heritage -- is the source of these and other problems. But he also suspects it doesn’t have to be that way. In Renewing Earth Timmerman travels across the United States and around the world to meet farmers and activists who employ practices and philosophies that acknowledge the human role in complicated agricultural systems and have found ways to alleviate it. Over and over again he finds farmers who see agriculture as not the problem but the solution, one that builds soil, promotes ecological diversity, provides people with meaningful lives and livelihoods, and sequesters Carbon—maybe even enough to combat climate change.

Timmerman takes readers along on his global adventure -- onto melting glaciers in Patagonia, into the Amazon, and down forgotten rivers. He protects a herd of cattle from lions alongside the Maasai warriors of Kenya, sees firsthand how chocolate could save the rainforest in Brazil, and meets American farmers who’ve rejected the agrochemical industry for an approach inspired by that of ancient and Indigenous peoples.  

By weaving the local with the global, Timmmerman shows readers how the way they live, their eating habits and relationship with nature connect to issues of environmental and social justice. 

Our hunger, and the agriculture required to alleviate it, can be a gift that connects us to chloroplasts, lions, mycorrhizal fungi, our fellow humans around the block and the world, and it is our responsibility to play an active part in a regenerative – not destructive -- future. 


Contenu

Introduction

A Regenerative Journey

I: ABUNDANCE

1: Plant the World You Want to Live In (Viola, Wisconsin)

Regenerative Agriculture is permanent agriculture

2: The Heart of the World (Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia)

Regenerative Agriculture is rooted in Indigenous knowledge

3: Root & Plow (Corn Belt, USA)

Regenerative Agriculture requires long-term thinking

II: FACING A MONSTER

4: No Soil at the End of the World (Kenya)

Regenerative Agriculture values life and soil

5: Eating the Rainforest (Amazon River Basin, Brazil)

Regenerative Agriculture protects our world

6: Hawaiian Pride B 4 Pesticides (Kaua'i)

Regenerative Agriculture rejects industrial agriculture

III: REGENERATION

7: River of Life (Bluffton, Georgia)

Regenerative Agriculture restarts the cycles of nature

8: Back to the Land (Small Farms, USA)

Regenerative Agriculture thrives on diversity

9: Downstream People (Mississinewa River, Indiana)

Regenerative Agriculture is knowing your river

Other Farms

Organizations

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index