The Restless and Relentless Mind of Wes Jackson: Searching for Sustainability. By Robert Jensen

Abstract

How will we live well in a future shaped by climate change? This question animates Robert Jensen’s The Restless and Relentless Mind of Wes Jackson: Searching for Sustainability. As a primer for understanding Jackson’s life, career, and philosophies, this immensely readable book introduces Jackson’s humble yet visionary ideas and practices to a new generation of scholars and engaged citizens. This work will inspire interdisciplinary scholars, environmental educators, secondary school teachers, community leaders, elected officials, farmers, and anyone invested in thinking about how to live well in a future increasingly marked by environmental and sociopolitical precarity. The Restless and Relentless Mind of Wes Jackson deserves a place on your bookshelf. Wes Jackson, the founder and long-time leader of the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, is a free-thinker. Jackson approaches problems with a unique blend of intellectual training and practical know-how. From thinking about modern humans as a “species out of context” to encouraging a shift from an industrial to a “creaturely” worldview, Jackson’s approach to living well centers on alternatives to corporate-capitalist, industrial culture (pp. 31, 106–118). With little faith in large-scale economic or technological fixes to the environmental crisis, Jackson urges us to “celebrate the discoveries that make possible low-energy living in stable, decent human communities” (pp. 81, 86).