An essential and timely collection of wise and compelling essays from one of the longtime leaders of the sustainable agriculture movement in America.Wes Jackson, “a well–known and admired advocate for sustainability especially as it relates to agriculture, has the rare ability to transform his convictions into captivating prose . . . Jackson’s thoughts are still as significant and profound as they were nearly 20 years ago” (Publishers Weekly) and can teach...

Hogs Are Up: Stories of the Land, with Digressions reveals what makes Wes Jackson tick. What kind of lessons does he draw from his unique life experiences, and how do they shape his profoundly revolutionary worldview? Sometimes funny, sometimes wistful, always insightful, this volume demonstrates that when telling a good story, digressions can be the main point. Born during the Great Depression, Jackson tells stories of his youth on a diversified farm in the Kansas River Valley ne...

Locavore leaders such as Alice Waters, Michael Pollan, and Barbara Kingsolver all speak of the need for sweeping changes in how we get our food. A longtime leader of this movement is Wes Jackson, who for decades has taken it upon himself to speak for the land, to speak for the soil itself. Here, he offers a manifesto toward a conceptual revolution: Jackson asks us to look to natural ecosystems—or, if one prefers, nature in general—as the measure against which we judge all of our agricultur...

In six compelling essays, Wes Jackson lays the foundation for a new farming economy grounded in nature's principles and located in dying small towns and rural communities. Exploding the tenets of industrial agriculture, Jackson seeks to integrate food production with nature in a way that sustains both. His writing is anchored in his work with The Land Institute, lending authenticity to topics that—in the hands of other writers—too often fail to escape the realm of the conceptual.

In this essay collection, one of the foremost voices in sustainable agriculture sets out a new approach to farming and community engagement.In these six compelling essays, Wes Jackson lays the foundation for a new farming economy grounded in nature's principles and located in dying small towns and rural communities. Exploding the tenets of industrial agriculture, Jackson seeks to integrate food production with nature in a way that sustains both.Jackson's radi...

Re-connecting to the land and living in harmony with the natural environment are the twin touchstones of this eloquent advocacy of sustainable agriculture. Jackson says that only by returning to nature's roots can we see a valid way out of the fossil fuel farm, which breeds costly high technology, ecological damage and bankrupt small farmers.

Confronting harsh ecological realities and the multiple cascading crises facing our world today, An Inconvenient Apocalypse argues that humanity’s future will be defined not by expansion but by contraction.For decades, our world has understood that we are on the brink of an apocalypse—and yet the only implemented solutions have been small and convenient, feel-good initiatives that avoid unpleasant truths about the root causes of our impending disaster. Wes...

In more than four decades as president of The Land Institute, Wes Jackson became widely known as one of the founders of the sustainable agriculture movement for his work on perennial grains and Natural Systems Agriculture. But Jackson’s contribution to contemporary intellectual and political life goes well beyond plant breeding. Ever since he created one of the first university environmental studies programs in the early 1970s, Jackson has been exploring the human predicaments around susta...

For decades, our world has understood that we are on the brink of an apocalypse—yet the only implemented solutions have been small and convenient, feel-good initiatives that avoid unpleasant truths about the root causes of our impending disaster. Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen argue that we must reconsider the origins of the consumption crisis and the challenges we face in creating a survivable future. Longstanding assumptions about economic growth and technological progress—the dream of a ...

The collection of lectures and publications from the Schumacher Center for a New Economics represents some of the foremost voices on a new economics.Wes Jackson points to agriculture—in particular to the methods of till agriculture, which cause soil loss and destroy the soil's water-holding capacity—as our "number one environmental problem, aside from nuclear war" (and today he would undoubtedly add global warming). As practiced, modern agriculture undercuts the very basis of its o...

The collection of lectures and publications from the Schumacher Center for a New Economics represents some of the foremost voices on a new economics.At the 36th Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures Mary Berry–Executive Director of The Berry Center–moderated a conversation between Berry and Jackson, during which they discussed the urgent problems that farmers are facing and the deep cultural divide between the inhabitants of urban and rural places. They called for a different kind of ed...

The collection of lectures and publications from the Schumacher Center for a New Economics represents some of the foremost voices on a new economics.Co-founder of The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, and pioneer in sustainable agriculture, Wes Jackson is here too a pioneer—for sustainable communities. Years of seeing the harm done to his beloved prairies through the implementation of corporate agricultural practices determined his dramatic move to the small, almost abandoned town ...