The Earth Only Endures: On Reconnecting with Nature and Our Place in It

By Jules Pretty

Book Overview

For most of human history, we have lived our daily lives in a close relationship with the land. Yet now, for the first time, more people are living in urban rather than rural areas, bringing about an estrangement. This book, by acclaimed author Jules Pretty, is fundamentally about our relationship with nature, animals and places. A series of interlinked essays leads readers on a voyage that weaves through the themes of connection and estrangement between humans and nature. The journey shows how our modern lifestyles and economies would need six or eight Earths if the entire worlds population adopted our profligate ways. Pretty shows that we are rendering our own world inhospitable and so risk losing what it means to be human: unless we make substantial changes, Gaia threatens to become Grendel. Ultimately, however, the book offers glimpses of an optimistic future for humanity, in the very face of climate change and pending global environmental catastrophe.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 184407613X
• ISBN13: 9781844076130
• Release Date: May 2009
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

The Earth Only Endures- a review

Pretty covers the "greening" of the early Earth (the emergence of life) over many aeons, our own development as a species to predominantly city-dwellers, and ways in which we have now disconnected from nature. He describes how we have moved from husbandry to exploitation and damage of the environment on which we depend, giving some stark examples. He does hold hope for the future but with some provisos. His argument quotes and is complimentary to Collapse (Penguin Press Science) I would thoroughly recommend reading Diamond's book in conjunction with this one. I liked Pretty's concept of "rewilding agriculture" and I would like to have read rather more about modern examples of alternatives to standard broadacre monocultures. I suspect without having read any that they are to be found in some of his other work.- Regenerating Agriculture: Policies and Practice for Sustainability and Self-Reliance This book is quite readable by the layperson.