ABSTRACT

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, bringing about an estrangement. This book, by acclaimed author Jules Pretty, is fundamentally about our relationship with nature, animals and places. A series of interlinked essays leads readers on a voyage that weaves through the themes of connection and estrangement between humans and nature. The journey shows how our modern lifestyles and economies would need six or eight Earths if the entire worlds population adopted our profligate ways. Pretty shows that we are rendering our own world inhospitable and so risk losing what it means to be human: unless we make substantial changes, Gaia threatens to become Grendel. Ultimately, however, the book offers glimpses of an optimistic future for humanity, in the very face of climate change and pending global environmental catastrophe.

part 1|51 pages

Green Places

chapter 1|5 pages

Becoming Green

chapter 2|18 pages

Birch Bark and Blue Sky

chapter 3|12 pages

A Room with a Green View

chapter 4|13 pages

Unhealthy Places

part 2|43 pages

Animals and Us

chapter 5|14 pages

Where the Wild Things Were

chapter 6|15 pages

Hunters and the Hunted

chapter 7|11 pages

Animal Magic

part 3|56 pages

Food and the Land

chapter 8|13 pages

The Fatta the Lan'

chapter 9|12 pages

Little Houses on the Prairie

chapter 10|13 pages

The Shadow of the Rain

chapter 11|14 pages

Rewilding Agriculture

part 4|42 pages

People and the Land

chapter 12|12 pages

Legible Landscapes

chapter 13|15 pages

Exclusion Zones

chapter 14|12 pages

Life and Land on the North Atlantic Fringe

part 5|27 pages

The Future

chapter 15|15 pages

Ecolution

chapter 16|9 pages

Liberation