Abstract
First paragraph: In Grass, Soil, Hope (2014, Chelsea Green), archaeologist-turned-activist-turned-cattle rancher (and now writer) Courtney White recounts a personal journey to discover on-the-ground-solutions to the rising challenges of the 21st century (Introduction, p. XX). Throughout the book he circles two common themes — the role of carbon in both creating and solving environmental problems, and paradigm change — and uses these themes to stitch together stories of ranching, organic farming, wetlands restoration, and beaver conservation, among others. Individually the stories are interesting forays into creativity and innovation at the local scale. Taken together, however, they suggest a compelling and hopeful thesis: that sustainability is not merely about learning to minimize human impacts, but about learning to reorganize our actions such that they become important to the rest of the natural community, fostering biodiversity and promoting healthy ecosystem structure and function....
Highlights
In Grass, Soil, Hope (2014, Chelsea Green), archaeologist-turned-activist-turned-cattle rancher Courtney White recounts a personal journey to discover “on-the-groundsolutions to the rising challenges of the 21st century”
He is a human ecologist with training in anthropology and ecology, and research interests in food systems and security, fisheries, and environmental justice. He can be contacted at phil.loring@usask.ca and followed on Twitter: @paloring. They suggest a compelling and hopeful thesis: that sustainability is not merely about learning to minimize human impacts, but about learning to reorganize our actions such that they become important to the rest of the natural community, fostering biodiversity and promoting healthy ecosystem structure and function
White urges the reader to abandon what he describes as the fatalistic and antagonistic philosophy of human nature that many environmentalists seem to embrace: that we are fundamentally destroyers of the natural world and that meeting our own needs will necessarily come at its expense
Summary
In Grass, Soil, Hope (2014, Chelsea Green), archaeologist-turned-activist-turned-cattle rancher (and writer) Courtney White recounts a personal journey to discover “on-the-groundsolutions to the rising challenges of the 21st century” They suggest a compelling and hopeful thesis: that sustainability is not merely about learning to minimize human impacts, but about learning to reorganize our actions such that they become important to the rest of the natural community, fostering biodiversity and promoting healthy ecosystem structure and function.
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