As both an international somatic educator and conceptual artist, I have explored direct perception through the sensory system for over 45 years. Focusing on human potential and core awareness through the portal of the neuro-core tissue called Psoas, I am the author of The Psoas Book and Core Awareness: Enhancing Yoga, Pilates, Exercise and Dance. I have come to appreciate that fostering personal integrity requires changing our language of the body from an object to a dynamic living process. To restore our core coherency, humans must wake up from our mechanistic separateness to once again be innovative organisms dancing in reciprocity with a living, dynamic Earth.
This book offers a response to a deep longing to be in the world with childlike curiosity. It encourages our direct perception of life through the energetic heart field. Although it is meant as a knowledgeable guide for listening to and communicating with plants, it elicits a poignant call during a time of profound alienation. Encouraging the letting go of top-down linear thinking, Buhner offers a step-by-step somatic path for decolonizing the soul. I discovered by exchanging the word “psoas” for “plant” the book easily becomes a personal guide for increasing our core awareness as it inspires opening the heart by rooting into a reciprocal relationship with the living Earth. To me, re-wilding my relationship with the deepest aspects of self is vitally personal and imperative if all life is to truly flourish.
All ancient and indigenous peoples insisted their knowledge of plant medicines came from the plants themselves and not through trial-and-error experimentation. Less well known is that many Western peoples made this same assertion. There are, in fact, two modes of cognition available to all human beings--the brain-based linear and the heart-based holistic. The heart-centered mode of perception can be exceptionally accurate and detailed in its information gathering capacities if, as indigenous and ancient peoples asserted, the heart's ability as an organ of perception is developed. Author Stephen Harrod Buhner explores this second mode of perception in great detail through the…
It was an emotional and very personal account of the author’s exploration of the Forest of Dean to see and understand the lives of wild boars. Once native to Britain, they have done their own rewilding after scores were released, often from farms where they were bred for meat.
I found that Chantal was able to convey the feeling of being in the forest and the wonder at seeing boar. I found the book informative and with a real feel of the pleasure the author gained from the boar and the forest. She has a way with words verging on the poetic – “I will miss the shapes of the sounder as they emerge into the night. No matter. I have basked in the sounds of them being themselves. It is enough to know they are here.”
'Full of joy, pathos, warmth, integrity and intrigue.' AMY-JANE BEER
'One of the most notable works of recent nature writing.' HELEN MACDONALD
'A thrilling expedition into a wild, unruly world.' LEE SCHOFIELD
'Gently thought-provoking and beautifully written.' LEIF BERSWEDEN
'The remarkable story of Britain's wild boar.' THE GUARDIAN
'A real page-turner.' STEPHEN MOSS
After centuries of absence, wild boar are back in Britain. What does this mean for us - and them?
Big, messy and mysterious - crossing paths with a wild boar can conjure fear and joy in equal measure. Driven to extinction seven hundred years ago, a combination…
Growing up, I built snow forts, climbed the white birch tree in my front yard, and talked to a rabbit named Bobby who lived in the bushes. I rode my bike on adventures, getting lost and exploring woods, ditches, and surrounding landscapes. In a household where I often felt unsafe, time outdoors was a refuge. Working in a career as a university professor of social work for the past 20 years, I have used mindful outdoor experiences, as well as yoga and meditation, as a source of healing. And I have loved sharing these practices with my students. Today, I am documenting my rewilding adventures in my van which has been a joyful way to honor my inner child.
This book blew my mind–the story of two sisters who walked the Appalachian trail barefoot. Across rocks, mud, and snow, and with some seriously calloused feet, the sisters learn about persistence and what it means to be part of nature and part of a community of other hikers who are slowly shedding their “civilized” selves.
I loved it because it kindled my own fantasy of walking the Appalachian trail myself someday. When I get whiny on an outdoor adventure due to challenging conditions, I can always think about the barefoot sisters who hiked 2000 miles over 6 months without shoes!
Rarely will you find books that explore the human emotions of a long-distance trek so honestly and clearly. --Roger Williamson, Campmor, Inc.
"Highly recommended." --trailsbib.blogspot.com
From the book: "We stood for a moment before the venerable signpost marking the summit. Scored with graffiti and the constant onslaught of weather, it stands perhaps three feet high, a wooden A-frame painted Forest Service brown with recessed white letters: KATAHDIN 5268 ft. Northern Terminus of the Appalachian Trail Below this were a few waypoints: Thoreau Spring, 1.0, Katahdin Stream Campground, 5.2. At the bottom of the list: Springer Mountain, Georgia, 2160.2. More than…
I did a master's in Environmental Policy, and at the end of that year, I thought, "this is all very well, but there’s no point designing these policies if no one wants them." My response to the environmental crisis is to try to open people’s eyes to the beauty and wonder of Nature. If you pay close attention, you start to develop an expansive sense of the ordinary: Creation is stranger, more mysterious, and more wonderful than we can imagine. This in turn helps us to love the world more deeply, and we tend to look after things that we love.
This was the book that made me look again at trees, seeing them for the incredible organisms that they are. Deakin goes on an amazing adventure from Suffolk to Kazakhstan, Australia, and beyond, trying to get to the heart of why wood and trees have such profound meaning for us. If you like Wildwood, you could also try Waterlog, in which he wild-swims his way through the British Isles. He’s the perfect companion for the armchair adventurer, and a very genial writer.
Here, published for the first time in the United States, is the last book by Roger Deakin, famed British nature writer and icon of the environmentalist movement. In Deakin's glorious meditation on wood, the "fifth element" -- as it exists in nature, in our culture, and in our souls -- the reader accompanies Deakin through the woods of Britain, Europe, Kazakhstan, and Australia in search of what lies behind man's profound and enduring connection with trees.
Deakin lives in forest shacks, goes "coppicing" in Suffolk, swims beneath the walnut trees of the Haut-Languedoc, and hunts bushplums with Aboriginal women in…
I’m an investigative journalist and social historian who’s obsessed with ‘invisible’ women of the 19th and early 20th century, bringing their stories to life in highly readable narrative non-fiction. I love the detective work involved in resurrecting ordinary women’s lives: shop girls, milliners, campaigning housewives, servants. . . The stories I’ve uncovered are gripping, often shocking and frequently poignant – but also celebrate women’s determination, solidarity and capacity for reinvention. Each of my two books took me on a long research journey deep into the archives: The Housekeeper’s Tale – the Women Who Really Ran the English Country House, and Etta Lemon – The Woman Who Saved the Birds.
Here’s how an intense, almost obsessive focus on wildlife can bring solace from chaos and alienation. Young bird-lover Hannah Bourne-Taylor moves to Ghana as a ‘trailing spouse,’ and it’s the fauna that keeps her going as she struggles to rebuild her identity. Two stray dogs leap into her life; a pangolin needs saving from someone’s dinner table. But it’s the act of saving a swift and a mannikin finch, nurturing and releasing the birds back into the wild, that provides the key to this closely observed, touching story. At first, the finch doesn’t want to re-wild – and Hannah realizes with a shock that she’s humanized it. Explores interesting dilemmas about intervening on nature’s behalf, and whether one act of compassion can really make a difference. A book full of hope.
Read the powerful account of one woman's fight to reshape her identity through connection with nature when all normality has fallen away.
When lifelong bird-lover Hannah Bourne-Taylor moved with her husband to Ghana seven years ago she couldn't have anticipated how her life would be forever changed by her unexpected encounters with nature and the subsequent bonds she formed.
Plucked from the comfort and predictability of her life before, Hannah struggled to establish herself in her new environment, striving to belong in the rural grasslands far away from home.
In this challenging situation, she was forced to turn inwards and…
I've spent a good part of my life exploring the outdoor world for the national parks service, for books, newspapers, and magazines. Each trip down a river, across a lake, up a mountain, or through a desert or swampland reminds me, as Wallace Stegner once suggested, that wilderness is as much a state of mind as it is a complex set of ecosystems. Wilderness is the geography of hope. Without the hope that comes with the wilderness experience, we would be lost. In my explorations, I've come to appreciate how much we still do not know about the natural world and how much hope there is that we can get through the challenges that climate change brings.
I took a course from Ed Wilson when I was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT and Harvard. Each one of his classes was a revelation, as were his books. He won the Pulitzer twice for On Human Nature and The Ants. But I particularly enjoyed The Diversity of Life. It was engaging and so prophetic – a sequel, as someone once said, to Darwin’s Origin of the Species.
A landmark collected edition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and world-renowned biologist, illuminating the marvels of biodiversity in a time of climate crisis and mass extinction.
Library of America presents three environmental classics from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner E. O. Wilson, a masterful writer-scientist whose graceful prose is equal to his groundbreaking discoveries. These books illuminate the evolution and complex beauty of our imperiled ecosystems and the flora, fauna, and civilization they sustain, even as they reveal the personal evolution of one of the greatest scientific minds of our age. Here are the lyrical, thought-provoking essays of Biophilia, a field biologist's…
If Women Rose Rooted has been described as both transformative and essential. Sharon Blackie leads the reader on a quest to find their place in the world, drawing inspiration from the wise and powerful women in native mythology, and guidance from contemporary role models who have re-rooted themselves in land and community and taken responsibility for shaping the future. Beautifully written, honest and moving, If Women Rose Rooted is a passionate song to a different kind of femininity, a rallying, feminist cry for the rewilding of womanhood; reclaiming our role as guardians of the land.
I am a writer, an anthropologist, and a mother. I spent five years researching ancient human survival skills and learning from modern wilderness survival experts about how to live the original Homo sapiens lifestyle. I became deeply invested in the importance of these skills amidst climate change and digital transformation because they connect us to our evolutionary heritage and safeguard our species’ survival into the future if and when our civilization collapses (as all past civilizations have done!) I find hope in being prepared for the possible demise of our industrial system, embracing the opportunities that arise instead of trying to preserve it at all costs.
One thing I realized in my rewilding journey was that I was totally dependent upon GPS – even when I was on an extended wander in nature and trying to feel at home in the wild.
Yet there are so many directional clues available to use for natural navigation, and Gooley makes it easy to learn how to read trees, water, animal sign, and plant growth to find our way. While paper and online maps give us a two-dimensional understanding of where we are, navigating with nature puts us in the center of the living world, engaged with everything around us.
From the New York Times-bestselling author of How to Read a Tree and The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs, rediscover nature by noticing the hidden clues all around you
“A truly vital book for any outdoor adventurer.”—Cabin Life
Before GPS, before the compass, and even before cartography, humankind was navigating. A windswept tree, the depth of a puddle, or a trill of birdsong could point the way home, and they still do—if you know how to look.
With The Natural Navigator, his first book, Tristan Gooley invited us to notice the directional clues hidden all around: in the sun,…
I’ve been trying to balance a need to help make the world a better place with my own small expertise as a musician and teacher. So I’ve played music with birds, whales, and bugs, taught philosophy to engineers for decades, written many books and released many albums, and traveled all over the world learning what people are doing to improve things. I need to find words to read that encourage me and lift me out of the looming pull of depressing statistics and real suffering that we all read about every day. I hope change is possible, and I urge everyone to work toward it in their own specific and unique ways.
Like Lisa Wells, I’ve spent years looking up to many possible heroes in my dream of making the world a better place. So much inspiration out there, and yet all our heroes become flawed the more we learn about them. How to remain hopeful when we find out the truth? Only through poetry, art, beauty, intensity. One of the finest books of the year, impossible to categorize.
"An essential document of our time." ―Charles D’Ambrosio, author of Loitering
In search of answers and action, the award-winning poet and essayist Lisa Wells brings us Believers, introducing trailblazers and outliers from across the globe who have found radically new ways to live and reconnect to the Earth in the face of climate change
We find ourselves at the end of the world. How, then, shall we live?
Like most of us, Lisa Wells has spent years overwhelmed by increasingly urgent news of climate change on an apocalyptic scale. She did not need to be convinced of the stakes, but…
I learned so much about the history of nature in cities--and I could barely keep up with my note taking imagining the future of landscapes in cities and suburbia.
An eye-opening and urgent re-examination of nature in our cities, from the Sunday Times bestselling author.
'Awe-inspiring... full of wonder, warning and hope' ISABELLA TREE, author of Wilding
Our modern-day cities might seem to represent our separation from the vitality of the natural world. Yet, as Ben Wilson reveals in this invigorating re-examination of urban landscapes across the globe, nature has always been at the heart of the city.
Moving from Los Angeles and Delhi to Singapore and Amsterdam, Wilson explores how the bond between humans and nature has oscillated throughout history, and shows that - in a time of…
