In our library, we compile inspiring texts and examples that teach us how to imagine a culture of love and living soil. Like a good garden, this library is diverse and will grow over time! We’ve organized digital bookshelves, nooks, and crannies to form a forest library.
The resources aren’t meant to be comprehensive, but meant to be encouraging with some of the ones that have been most relevant to our work and life and that keep informing us. All of them fall under the broad canopy of Love, Liberation, and Land.
Farming, Forests, Food Sovereignty
“Agroecology: Putting Food Sovereignty into Action” by Why Hunger
Agroecology: Science and Politics by Peter Rosset and Miguel Altieri
As in the Heart, So in the Earth: Reversing Desertification in the Soul and in the Soil by Pierre Rabhi
Coppice Agroforestry: Tending Trees for Product, Profit, and Woodland Ecology by Mark Krawczyk
Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability by Alison Hope Alkon and Julian Agyeman
“Declaration of Food Sovereignty” by La Via Campesina
Farming the Woods: An Integrated Permaculture Approach to Growing Food and Medicinals in Temperate Forests by Ken Mudge and Steve Gabriel
Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on Land by Leah Penniman
“The Lost Forest Gardens of Europe” by Max Paschall of Shelterwood Forest Farm
“A nursery theory of change” by Jonathan McRay
Peasants and the Art of Farming: A Chayanovian Manifesto by Jan Douwe van der Ploeg
“Peasant Agroecology for Food Sovereignty and Mother Earth: Experiences of La Via Campesina”
“Peasant Agroecology Schools and the Peasant-to-Peasant Method of Horizontal Learning” by La Via Campesina
“Regenerative Agriculture Needs a Reckoning” by Joe Fassler
Sprout Lands: Tending the Endless Gifts of Trees by William Bryant Logan (also see his shorter essay called “Woods Work”)
Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture by J. Russell Smith
Trees of Power: Ten Essential Arboreal Allies by Akiva Silver
Woodlanders video series
For more in this category, click here!
Roots, Resistance, Reparation
Columbus and Other Cannibals by Jack D. Forbes
“Decolonization is Not a Metaphor” by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang
Elite Capture and Reconsidering Reparations by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
Food First Backgrounders on Dismantling Racism in the Food System
Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement by Monica M. White
A History of the World in 7 Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet by Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore
An Indigenous People’s History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Land and Freedom: The MST, the Zapatistas and Peasant Alternatives to Neoliberalism by Leandro Vergara-Camus
“Love as the Practice of Freedom” by bell hooks
"On Being White . . . And Other Lies" by James Baldwin
People’s Agreement of Cochabamba
A People’s Green New Deal by Max Ajl
“Racism Is Killing the Planet” by Hop Hopkins
“A Radical Alliance of Black and Green Could Save the World” by James Gustave Speth and J. Phillip Thompson III
The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth by The Red Nation
“Roots Deeper Than Whiteness” by David Dean
“The Transformative Power of Practice” by Ng’ethe Maina and Staci Haines
“Whose Earth Is It Anyway?” by James Cone
For more in this category, click here!
Commons, Collectives, Cooperatives
“How to Trust the Land: A Brief Guide to the Commons and Land Trusts” by us!
“Could Putting Farmland in the Commons Support Land Justice and Sustainability?” by Danielle Beurtreaux
“An Enormous Land Transition Is Underway. Here’s How to Make it Just” by Neil Thapar
“How One Boston Neighborhood Stopped Gentrification In Its Tracks” by Penn Loh
“A New Model for Community-Owned Farmland” by Agrarian Trust
Jackson Rising Redux: Lessons on Building the Future in the Present by Kali Akuno and Matt Meyer
Stop, Thief!: The Commons, Enclosure, and Resistance by Peter Linebaugh
Unsettling the Commons: Social Movements Within, Against, and Beyond Settler Colonialism by Craig Fortier
Resources:
Cooperative Farming: A Greenhorns Guidebook by Faith Gilbert
Land Reparations and Indigenous Solidarity Toolkit by Resource Generation
Reparations Summer by the Black Land Liberation Initiative
For more in this category, click here!
Story, Spell, Speech
The Art of the Commonplace and The Hidden Wound by Wendell Berry
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature by J. Drew Lanham
Landmarks, The Lost Words and The Lost Spells (with Jackie Morris), Ness by Robert Macfarlane
The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono
“The Power of the Tree” by Wangari Maathai
Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit Based Change by Sherri Mitchell
“Speaking of Nature” by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Scatterlings: Getting Claimed in the Age of Amnesia (introduction “Small Gods”) and Smokehole by Martin Shaw
The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram
The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic: The Parallel Lives of People as Plants: Keeping the Seeds Alive by Martín Prechtel
Incredible Inspirations and Influences
Alliance of Native Seedkeepers
East Bay Permanent Real Estate Collective
Highlander Research and Education Center
Indigenous Environmental Network
LANDBACK (NDN Collective)
Renewing America’s Food Traditions