Trauma Farm (49 page)

Wendell Berry.
The Unsettling of America
. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1997. One of his many books about rural life. A poet and philosopher of the land, Wendell Berry was among the first and best at warning us about the destruction of the rural world and its glories.

Kathleen Norris Brenzel, ed.
The Western Garden Book
. Menlo Park, CA: Sunset, 2001. The editor calls this “the ultimate guide to Western gardening.” She might be right. A comprehensive list of nursery plants and their requirements that can also be useful to gardeners in North America and England.

Albert Camus.
The Myth of Sisyphus.
New York: Vintage International, 1983. An adventure into the absurdity of life. Camus was an original-thinking explorer of meaning as well as social behaviour and ethics (especially in
The Rebel
and
Resistance, Rebellion, and Death
).

Rachel Carson.
Silent Spring
. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1964. The book that alerted North America to the dangers of pesticides.

Rosalind Creasey.
Cooking from the Garden: Creative Gardening &
Contemporary Cuisine
. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1988. Pricey but essential for gourmands of the garden.

Christopher Dewdney.
Acquainted with the Night
. Toronto: HarperCollins Canada, 2004. The joy of darkness.

Jared Diamond.
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
. New York: Viking, 2005. A recent wordy but impressive examination of the dangers facing human cultural evolution. The chapter on the extinction of the Greenland farming communities is fabulous.

Annie Dillard.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
. New York: Harper’s Magazine Press, 1975. A luminous, nearly precious naturalist observes the world around her. A lyrical updating of Walden.

Loren Eiseley.
The Immense Journey, The Star Thrower, The Night Country,
All the Strange Hours
. Any of his books is a poetic adventure. Science meets literature. A “wood child” whose haunted writings are venerated by naturalists worldwide.

Carla Emery.
The Encyclopedia of Country Living
. Seattle: Sasquatch, 1994. An insanely inclusive ongoing book that started out as how-to newsletters sold at craft fairs in 1970 and a twelve-page table of contents, and ended only with Emery’s death in 2005. A quirky, massive effort, it got very little wrong during a lifetime of compiling traditional knowledge. If you are going to be left alone with one book while maintaining a farm, this is that book.

Ron L. England.
Growing Great Garlic: The Definitive Guide for Organic
Gardeners and Small Farmers.
Okanogan, wa : Filaree Productions, 1991. This book is pretty well what it says it is. For the true garlic fetishist.

Jean-Henri Fabre.
The Insect World of J. Henri Fabre
. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1949. Everything you wanted to know about dung beetles and more. A collection of essays by the prolific and eloquent nineteenth-century god of entomologists.

M.F.K. Fisher.
The Art of Eating
. New York: Macmillan, 1990. The high priestess of cookbook writers, a great cook, stylist, and eccentric. Five of her most noted books collected in one volume.

Wayne Grady.
Bringing Back the Dodo
. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2007. Or just about any of his other books. The former editor of
Harrowsmith
in its glory days, Grady is a hard-working, no-nonsense naturalist who is always interesting. Graham Harvey.
We Want Real Food: Why Our Food Is Deficient in
Minerals and Nutrients—and What We Can Do about It.
London: Constable, 2006. Sometimes simplistic yet substantial exploration of the effects industrialized farming is having on food and the ecology.

Bernd Heinrich.
Mind of the Raven
. New York: HarperCollins, 1999. The mind that explores the mind of the raven is also fascinating.

Hesiod and Theognis
. London: Penguin Classic, 1976. Hesiod’s eighth-century bc poem
Works and Days
is the earliest writing on farming I’ve encountered. Most people today would consider his vision of small farming terrifying and unacceptable, but it has its moments of common sense.

Lewis Hyde.
The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property
. New York: Vintage, 1983. My copy was given to me by a friend. It’s a real gift.

Daniel Imhoff and Jo Ann Baumgartner, eds.
Farming and the Fate of
Wild Nature: Essays in Conservation-Based Agriculture
. Berkeley: University of California Press, Watershed Media, 2006. A fine collection of essays.

Verlyn Klinkenborg.
The Rural Life
. Boston: Back Bay Books, 2002. He’s also written the lovely
Making Hay
and other memoirs. According to a review in the
New York Times
this book is “luminous . . . a brilliant book.” The review is correct.

Brewster Kneen.
Farmageddon: Food and the Culture of Biotechnology
. Gabriola Island, B.C.: New Society, 1999. A well-wrought rant against the green revolution and globalized farming and its technology.

Aldo Leopold.
A Sand County Almanac
. New York: Ballantine, 1971. “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” The master naturalist and his greatest work. This is the book where he first observed how the removal of a keystone species can wreak havoc on the entire ecosystem in what’s now known as a trophic cascade.

John A. Livingston.
Rogue Primate: An Exploration of Human
Domestication
. Toronto: Key Porter, 1994. Chilling thoughts from an incisive thinker.

William Bryant Logan.
Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth
. New York: Riverhead, 1995. An enchanting exploration of soil.

Barry Lopez.
Of Wolves and Men
. New York: Scribner, 1978. A book that is informative not only about wolves but about our relationship with the “wild.”

Konrad Z. Lorenz.
King Solomon’s Ring
. New York: Mentor, 1991. Animal behaviour innovatively examined.

Richard A. Nelson.
Heart and Blood: Living with Deer in America
. New York: Random House, 1998. By the author of the much-admired
The Island Within
. This landmark study is the definitive book on how the deer plague is remaking vast swaths of the North American environment.

Andrew Nikiforuk.
Pandemonium: Bird Flu, Mad Cow Disease, and Other
Biological Plagues of the 21st Century
. Toronto: Viking Canada, 2006. Nikiforuk is a penetrating researcher into environmental issues.

Raj Patel.
Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the
World’s Food System
. Toronto: HarperCollins Canada, 2007. For those who like their agriculture buttered with statistics. An ominous picture of food economics and market manipulation.

Angelo Pellegrini.
The Unprejudiced Palate
. New York: Macmillan, 1984. A deliciously prejudiced and opinionated memoir about growing up with real (though scant) food, and then relearning the art of its preparation.

Michael Pollan.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
. New York: Penguin, 2006. A classic work on the modern diet. His
In Defence of Food
is also a must-read.

Irma S. Rombauer (with Marion Rombauer Becker).
Joy of Cooking
.New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964. After my first copy fell apart I practically had to fight three people off to buy this eclectic, supremely sensible collection of traditional recipes at a garage sale. The 1975 edition is reputedly the best. The New Age Heart Smart “professional” revision of 1997 by hired authors is a notorious disaster in book publishing. I believe the newest edition returns to many of the traditional recipes and original voice of Rombauer.

Candace Savage.
Curious by Nature
. Vancouver: Greystone, 2005. A charming collection of naturalist essays by one of Canada’s hardest-working environmental writers.

Eric Schlosser.
Fast Food Nation
. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. A devastating book about the fast-food industry and the monopolistic monstrousness of the new American food empires. Required reading (along with Michael Pollan) for those who care about what they eat and what their children eat.

E.F. Schumacher.
Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered
. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. A groundbreaking book on reverse thinking.

John Seymour.
The Self-Sufficient Gardener
. Garden City, ny : Dolphin, 1980. The best book on wide deep-bed gardening. Straight-talking, succinct, common-sense gardening, and highly recommended.

Scott Slovic.
Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing
. Salt Lake City: University of Utah, 1982. Thoreau. Dillard. Abbey. Berry. Lopez. A collection of essays on five great American naturalists.

Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon.
The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local
Eating
. Toronto: Random House Canada, 2007. The rallying cry for the champions of local food.

Steve Solomon.
Organic Gardening West of the Cascades
. Seattle: Pacific Search, 1981. A somewhat New Age West Coast organic text, but also full of common sense and straightforward gardening advice that would apply worldwide.

Don Stap.
Birdsong
. New York: Scribner, 2005. Charming. A look at birds and their songs. Packed with engrossing trivia and important information.

Robert Sullivan.
Rats
. New York: Bloomsbury, 2004. A fascinating obsession for the writer. Full of facts though a little too obsessive for this reader.

Jiro Takei and Marc P. Keane.
Sakuteiki Visions of the Japanese Garden:
A Modern Translation of Japan’s Gardening Classic
. Boston: Tuttle, 2001. Includes a translation of the
Sakuteiki
(Records of Garden Making). Written a thousand years ago, it begins with the evocative phrase “the art of setting stones” and works its way through the garden. Only for those compulsive gardeners interested in the arcane and deep Japanese aesthetics.

Henry David Thoreau.
Walden
,
Journals
, etc. Almost everything he wrote. After young Thoreau accidentally set the local woods on fire, he made it his life’s work to understand the world around him, and did a mighty fine job of it.

Ronald Wright.
A Short History of Progress
. Toronto: Anansi, 2004. The inspired Massey Lectures that succinctly examine cultural evolution.

In addition I can recommend the magazines
Organic Gardening
and
Small Farm Canada
, and the early editions of
Harrowsmith
magazine. The various
Harrowsmith
books are usually excellent on an assortment of rural subjects, along with the
Foxfire
books. The same with the numerous editions and titles of
The Whole Earth Catalog
.

Websites like Wikipedia are often unreliable, although Wikipedia is a good starting point for research on the Internet. As almost everyone knows by now, the Internet can be a treacherous but juicy source of facts and factoids and opinions; just be aware of the agendas of the websites, and look for confirmation of any facts elsewhere.