What We’re Reading at r3.0 (13)
By Bill Baue
Earlier this month, our good friend (and r3.0 Advocation Partner) Philippe Diaz posted a LinkedIn article entitled Embracing Collapse and Enjoying It? in which he urges readers to “invest time and capital in upskilling”:
“better use whatever time remains to do and learn stuff: growing food, foraging, stitching, woodworking, playing an instrument, dancing… whatever really. It helps increase resilience.”
This message resonates deeply with me. I’m on the cusp of transitioning from several years of transitional home-renting into owning a modest homestead, so I’ve been devoting all the time I can spare to educating myself on resilience skills. My wife is an even more voracious reader than me, and is famous at our local library for filling entire shelves with 20–30 books at a time on order from interlibrary loan. So I proposed a library catalog search strategy to her: filter for Chelsea Green Publishing.
I’ve long respected Chelsea Green as a preeminent publisher of books on sustainability, including The MultiCapital Scorecard by Mark McElroy & Martin Thomas, Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth, Thinking in Systems by Dana Meadows, and the 30-Year Update of Limits to Growth, to name just a few.
But what really distinguishes Chelsea Green is its focus on regeneration and resilience, two things dear to our heart here at r3.0 (along with redesign)! In particular, Chelsea Green specializes in permaculture, a fundamental umbrella concept for a collapse resilient skill-set.
So I want to devote this edition of What We’re Reading not to an in-depth review of one or two books, but rather to touch on a host of books I’m currently dabbling in, with the hope that this kind of guidance can help you navigate your own upskilling journey.
First on my list would be Ben Falk’s The Resilient Farm and Homestead, which is infused with awareness of carrying capacity overshoot — accompanied by hands-on strategies for adapting to the consequences thereof at the homestead scale. I particularly appreciate is Falk’s 72 permaculture Principles, including using fossil fuels available today (before they run out or become prohibitively expensive) to build resilient systems — and of course, I heard this Principle mentioned the very next day after I read it (on a Design School for Earth Regeneration call in the Birthing Bioregional Learning Centers Learning Journey.)
(Funny story — we had 2 copies floating around for a while, one from the library, and one that my wife had forgotten having bought in the past. I mentioned this story to my good friend and former cohousing neighbor River Strong, and he inquired if one of them was the new Revised & Expanded Edition — alas, no, so it looks like we’ll be sending some more $$ to Founding Publisher Margo Baldwin…)
Next up is the two-volume permaculture bible (ok, Bill Mollison’s 600-page Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual is the original permaculture bible), Edible Forest Gardens (Volume One on Vision & Theory, Volume Two on Design & Practice) by Dave Jacke and Eric Toensmeier, which only just arrived in our household, so I haven’t had time to do more than scan it. But I’ve known about this line of work for years, since my time living in Western Massachusetts where much of the thinking and practice documented in the books was developed — including through the Tierra de Oportunidades new farmer program at the 30-acre La Finca urban farm run by Nuestras Raices, a grassroots urban agriculture organization based in Holyoke (that is the subject, in part, of Toensmeier’s Paradise Lot).
Toensmeier is also author of The Carbon Farming Solution, which lays out a comprehensive case for regenerative agriculture as a means of sequestering increasing amounts of (soil-enhancing) carbon while also developing approaches to food production that are more resilient to climate change. What’s particularly satisfying about this book is how it blends a necessary grounding in the research documenting the case for agriculture as a sufficient carbon sink to put a dent in global warming (drawn in part from his fellowship position at Project Drawdown).
Other recent arrivals include Fibershed by Rebecca Burgess, which taps into the growing global movement to return to a localized textile economy exemplified by Fibreshed Scotland that my colleague Kate Dyer is active in. The fibershed movement is integrally linked to the bioregional movement that is similarly focused on the interweaving of geophysical landscape with metaphysical culture-scapes.
Rainwater Harvesting by Brad Lancaster is yet another pragmatic guidebook that will prove necessary as extreme weather events (on both ends of the water spectrum, from drought to deluge) intensity, forcing us to become more creative with how we engage with this most vital of all resources.
The Chelsea Green catalog integrates social justice with books such as Farming While Black by Leah Penniman, which chronicles her work establishing Soul Fire Farm as a manifesto and guidebook for farmers of color to assert agency and reclaim the legacy of agricultural heritage that has been denied through racist oppression and political policies.
I could continue on for pages (you should see the stack of Chelsea Green titles on my bedside stand!), but I want to end this overview with one modest step outside the Chelsea Green ecosystem, into its realm of its west coast counterpart / rival, New Society Publishers.
The permaculture concept that currently captures my imagination is Coppice Agroforestry by Mark Krawczyk, which covers the ancient art of tree-cutting in ways that promote re-sprouting — which is also known as pollarding when cutting at chest-level or higher to retain some height for preventing animals from grazing the sprouts.
(It is telling that the New Society logo, which has existing since long before this book was published, is a graphical representation of coppicing, with a new shoot emerging from the “stool” (ie stump) of a felled tree…)
I look forward to upskilling with coppicing and pollarding for fence-making and biomass harvesting to fuel the woodstove in ways that move toward self-reliance — and perhaps transferring these skills in the future as part of a bioregional learning center curriculum that includes many other skills gleaned from the Chelsea Green and New Society catalogs…
