Here are 100 books that The Art of the Commonplace fans have personally recommended if you like
The Art of the Commonplace.
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All my life, I’ve been aware that there are many layers to reality, many of which are human fabrications. Some are physical, like roads. Some are social, like healthcare. But the ones that control our lives the most, and that determine our global outcomes (poverty, war and ecological degradation for example), are ideological. The most powerful of these is our economic system. If we are to address the meta-crisis, I feel passionately that we need to be able to question and reimagine the economy. All the books I’ve chosen have been really important in helping me to think differently about things we usually take for granted.
I love this book because of how beautiful and hopeful it is. The author pulls together amazing stories from her life to gradually weave an understanding of the meta-crisis we find ourselves in. I was captivated by the way she contrasts her family’s indigenous American culture with our modern approaches to both science and the economy.
I love Robin’s prose, which is exquisitely written. But perhaps what I value the most is the fact that she writes with optimism, giving me the courage to get up every day and think about how to put her wisdom into practice.
Called the work of "a mesmerizing storyteller with deep compassion and memorable prose" (Publishers Weekly) and the book that, "anyone interested in natural history, botany, protecting nature, or Native American culture will love," by Library Journal, Braiding Sweetgrass is poised to be a classic of nature writing. As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer asks questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces indigenous teachings that consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers. Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take "us on a journey that is…
I am an author and former environmental activist who dropped out of the ‘conflict industry’ in 1997 to start the Quivira Coalition, a nonprofit organization dedicated to building a radical center among ranchers, environmentalists, scientists, and others around practices that improve resilience in working landscapes. For two decades, I worked on the front lines of collaborative conservation and regenerative agriculture, sharing innovative, land-based solutions to food, water, and climate challenges. I live in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Farming While Black explores an often neglected perspective on regenerative agriculture. It is a “how to” guide for aspiring African-heritage growers to reclaim their dignity as agriculturists, but Penniman also wants everyone to understand the contributions of African-heritage people to farming. She explores soil fertility, seed selection, using whole foods in culturally appropriate recipes, and sharing stories of ancestors including the trauma associated with slavery and economic exploitation. The book tells the story of Soul Fire Farm, located in upstate New York, a national leader in the food justice movement.
Leah Penniman - recipient of the James Beard Foundation Leadership Award 2019'An extraordinary book...part agricultural guide, part revolutionary manifesto.' VOGUE
'Farming While Black offers a guide to reclaiming food systems from white supremacy.' Bon Appetit
In 1920, 14 percent of all land-owning US farmers were black. Today less than 2 percent of farms are controlled by black people, a loss of over 14 million acres and the result of discrimination and dispossession. While farm management is among the whitest of professions, farm labour is predominantly brown and exploited and people of color disproportionately live in 'food apartheid' neighborhoods and suffer…
Leah Naomi Green is the author of The More Extravagant Feast, selected by Li-Young Lee for the Walt Whitman Award of The Academy of American Poets. She received the 2021 Lucille Clifton Legacy Award for compassion, courage, truth-telling, and commitment to justice, as well an Academy of American Poets 2021 Treehouse Climate Action Poetry Prize. The More Extravagant Feast was named “one of the best books of 2020” by The Boston Globe, is a silver winner of the 2020 Nautilus Book Awards, and was featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered”. She lives in Rockbridge County, Virginia where she and her family homestead and grow or find much of their food for the year.
There is not a better poet writing in English. For Graham, language is a beautiful, purposeful tool and she is using it, without pretense, to dig deeper and deeper into the ground of being. She asks the questions beneath the questions, and though she does not pretend to answer them, the reader shares and marvels in her asking, in her attention to being human and alive.
“Graham’s poetry is among the most sensuously embodied and imaginative writing we have.” —New York Times
“One of the most important living poets.” —Library Journal
Place is a new collection of poems from Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham. An extraordinary American artist whom The New Yorker calls “a mesmerizing voice” Graham is renowned for poetry that is startling, original, and deeply relevant, and has been placed in the poetic lineage of such masters as T.S. Eliot and John Ashbery. In Place, Graham explores the ways in which our imagination, intuition, and experience aid us in navigating a world moving towards…
Leah Naomi Green is the author of The More Extravagant Feast, selected by Li-Young Lee for the Walt Whitman Award of The Academy of American Poets. She received the 2021 Lucille Clifton Legacy Award for compassion, courage, truth-telling, and commitment to justice, as well an Academy of American Poets 2021 Treehouse Climate Action Poetry Prize. The More Extravagant Feast was named “one of the best books of 2020” by The Boston Globe, is a silver winner of the 2020 Nautilus Book Awards, and was featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered”. She lives in Rockbridge County, Virginia where she and her family homestead and grow or find much of their food for the year.
In this book-length poem, Ross Gay manages to “talk” to the reader intimately without once “mansplaning” the way that so much of the tradition of “nature writing” has, for centuries, done. With the refrains of “what am I seeing?” and “what am I practicing?” Gay creates what feels like a genuine conversation with the reader, allowing me to ask myself the same questions as I read, to form my own thoughts and feelings, rather than passively receiving his.
In what I find to be his best work yet, Gay offers a genuine invitation to the reader to join into the seeing and feeling and meaning-making, thus making the meaning-making infinitely more meaningful. Be Holding is like a personal letter taken from its envelope, but somehow intended for all of us. It is as intricate as it is accessible and clear.
Through a kind of lyric research, or lyric meditation, Be Holding connects Dr. J's famously impossible move from the 1980 NBA Finals against the Los Angeles Lakers to pick-up basketball and the flying Igbo and the Middle Passage, to photography and surveillance and state violence, to music and personal histories of flight and familial love.
Be Holding wonders how the imagination, or how our looking, might make us, or bring us, closer to each other. How our looking might make us reach for each other. And might make us be reaching for each…
Ever since I was a boy growing up in a small working-class shipyard town in the great Pacific Northwest near Seattle, I have experienced the jaw-dropping beauty of the natural world and human kindness overflowing, right alongside the numbing horror of human cruelty, war, racism, and environmental damage. It didn’t make sense, this joy and woe, so I’ve had a life’s mission to find ways of healing and integrating a broken world. These books have been a balm and refuge, offering me a deeper perspective, spiritual grounding, and pathways toward “the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.” I hope they might benefit you too.
I am deeply troubled by how we are harming the earth, our Mother. I have also been a student of Thich Nhat Hanh’s for over 30 years and now a teacher in his tradition. This is his last book before he passed, and perfect for me, as a spiritual practitioner and an environmental activist. The book is an antidote to my periodic bouts of despair about climate change. It provides penetrating understanding of the suffering on the planet and its root causes in greed, hatred, and the delusion of separateness. I loved his stories, teachings, and practical advice for healing and transforming the roots of suffering that lie deep in my/our consciousness. A profound and moving book that I return to frequently for solace and guidance.
“When you wake up and you see that the Earth is not just the environment, the Earth is us, you touch the nature of interbeing. And at that moment you can have real communication with the Earth… We have to wake up together. And if we wake up together, then we have a chance. Our way of living our life and planning our future has led us into this situation. And now we need to look deeply to find a way out, not only as individuals, but as a collective, a species.”
I am an author and former environmental activist who dropped out of the ‘conflict industry’ in 1997 to start the Quivira Coalition, a nonprofit organization dedicated to building a radical center among ranchers, environmentalists, scientists, and others around practices that improve resilience in working landscapes. For two decades, I worked on the front lines of collaborative conservation and regenerative agriculture, sharing innovative, land-based solutions to food, water, and climate challenges. I live in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Gabe Brown didn’t set out to change the world when he first started working alongside his father-in-law on the family farm in North Dakota. But a series of weather-related crop disasters put Brown in desperate financial straits. He decided to quit the industrial model of food production and began experimenting with regenerative agriculture instead. He stopped using herbicides, insecticides, and synthetic fertilizers. He no-tilled diverse crops into his fields and changed his grazing practices. By doing so, Brown transformed a degraded farm ecosystem into one full of life. Brown has grown several inches of new topsoil in only twenty years and turned the farm into a diverse, profitable enterprise. This book is a great introduction for all readers.
'Dirt to Soil is the [regenerative farming] movements's holy text' The Observer
Author and farmer Gabe Brown, featured in the Netflix documentary Kiss the Ground
'A regenerative no-till pioneer' NBC News
'Dirt to Soil confirms my belief that animals are part of the natural land. We need to reintegrate livestock and crops on our farms and ranches, and Gabe Brown shows us how to do it well.' Temple Grandin, author of Animals in Translation
Soil health pioneer Gabe Brown did not set out to write a book on no-till, regenerative agriculture but that was the end product of his research…
I am an author and former environmental activist who dropped out of the ‘conflict industry’ in 1997 to start the Quivira Coalition, a nonprofit organization dedicated to building a radical center among ranchers, environmentalists, scientists, and others around practices that improve resilience in working landscapes. For two decades, I worked on the front lines of collaborative conservation and regenerative agriculture, sharing innovative, land-based solutions to food, water, and climate challenges. I live in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
In this book, Australian farmer Charles Massey takes a ‘big picture’ view of regenerative agriculture. It’s full of personal stories but it also goes deep into the history of industrial agriculture, the damage it continues to do, and how we can heal the planet. Massey lays out an inspiring vision for a new agriculture and the vital connections between our soil and our health. It’s a story of how a grassroots revolution can help turn climate change around and build healthy communities, pivoting on our relationship with growing and consuming food.
Part lyrical nature writing, part storytelling, part solid scientific evidence, part scholarly research, part memoir, the book is an elegant manifesto, an urgent call to stop trashing the Earth and start healing it. the Guardian
Perfect for readers of Wilding, Dirt to Soil and English Pastoral!
Call of the Reed Warbler is a clarion call for the global transformation of agriculture, and an in-depth look at the visionary farmers who are revolutionising the way we grow, eat, and think about food.
Using his personal experience as a touchstone, starting as a chemical-dependent farmer with dead soils, he recounts his journey…
I am an author and former environmental activist who dropped out of the ‘conflict industry’ in 1997 to start the Quivira Coalition, a nonprofit organization dedicated to building a radical center among ranchers, environmentalists, scientists, and others around practices that improve resilience in working landscapes. For two decades, I worked on the front lines of collaborative conservation and regenerative agriculture, sharing innovative, land-based solutions to food, water, and climate challenges. I live in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
In this lively book, soil scientist Nicole Masters digs into the global soil crisis and explains how regenerative agriculture can restore degraded land, repair natural cycles, and bring vitality back to ecosystems. The book translates the often complex and technical know-how of soil into understandable terms with case studies from regenerative farmers and ranchers in Australasia and North America. Along with sharing key soil health principles and restoration tools, Masters provides an action plan to heal the planet.
*Newly Edited Version* Learn a roadmap to healthy soil and revitalised food systems for powerfully address these times of challenge. This book equips producers with knowledge, skills and insights to regenerate ecosystem health and grow farm/ranch profits. Learn how to:- Triage soil health and act to fast-track soil and plant health-Build healthy resilient soil systems-Develop a deeper understanding of microbial and mineral synergies-Read what weeds and diseases are communicating about soil and plant health-Create healthy, productive and profitable landscapes.Globally recognised soil advocate and agroecologist Nicole Masters delivers the solution to rewind the clock on this increasingly critical soil crisis in…
I’m a political economist interested in development which I’ve been studying, researching, and writing about since my undergraduate days in the early 1990s.
This short (190-page) book shows how the global food system is intrinsically connected to world region’s diverse developmental trajectories, covering the colonial era to the green revolution to the contemporary corporate-dominated food system.
Historically, agriculture has been subordinated ever more tightly to capitalist imperatives of profit – based upon increased, faster, and cheaper production. Agriculture has been transformed from a ‘closed loop system’, where soil fertility was renewed based upon locally-available resources (such as animal manure), to a through-flow system dependent upon external inputs.
This shift raised yields for a while, but at the cost of soil exhaustion and the accumulation of power and resources in the hands of agrochemical companies at the expense of the small farmer sector.
Weis suggests that we need to consider new ways of producing our food, which would also establish new forms of world development.
The Global Food Economy examines the human and ecological cost of what we eat.
The current food economy is characterized by immense contradictions. Surplus 'food mountains', bountiful supermarkets, and rising levels of obesity stand in stark contrast to widespread hunger and malnutrition. Transnational companies dominate the market in food and benefit from subsidies, whilst farmers in developing countries remain impoverished. Food miles, mounting toxicity and the 'ecological hoofprint' of livestock mean that the global food economy rests on increasingly shaky environmental foundations.
This book looks at how such a system came about, and how it is being enforced by the…
In the late 1980s, I led a team of researchers who studied relations between Vietnamese refugees, Hispanic immigrants, and native-born residents of Garden City, Kansas, many of whom came to work in what was then the world’s largest beef packing plant. I became fascinated by the meat and poultry industry. Since then, I have studied industry impacts on communities, plant workers, farmers and ranchers in Nebraska, Oklahoma, and my hometown in Kentucky. The meat and poultry industry is highly concentrated, heavily industrialized, and heavily reliant on immigrant labor. As such, it has much to teach us about where our food comes from and how it is made.
I like this one because it reveals what is wrong with modern meat production, not only within the broad context of industrial agriculture but also the governmental policies and corporate control of what we eat.
It ranges widely from corporate control of plant and animal genetics to who raises what we eat and dictates where and how it is grown, to the chemicals that go onto our fruits and vegetables and into our bodies, to government oversight and regulation of food safety and animal welfare; to corporate concentration at every link in the food chain.
But what I appreciate most of all is Hauter’s extensive and thoughtful analysis of what can be done to break up the foodopolies and rebuild a healthy and just food system.
Wenonah Hauter runs an organic family farm in Northern Virginia that provides healthy vegetables to over five hundred families. Despite this, as one of the nation's leading healthy food advocates, Hauter believes that the local food movement is not enough to solve America's food crisis and the public health debacle it has created. In Foodopoly, she takes aim at the real culprit: the massive consolidation and corporate control of food production, which prevents farmers from raising healthy crops and limits the choices that people can make in the grocery store.
