Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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Books by Gary Nabhan
http://www.garynabhan.com/books.html

Where Our Food Comes From -
Retracing Nikolay Vavilov's Quest to End Famine, 2008
Gary Paul Nabhan
Released on: 09/12/2008

The future of our food depends on tiny seeds in orchards and fields the world 
over. In 1943, one of the first to recognize this fact, the great botanist 
Nikolay Vavilov, lay dying of starvation in a Soviet prison. But in the years 
before Stalin jailed him as a scapegoat for the country's famines, Vavilov 
had traveled over five continents, collecting hundreds of thousands of seeds 
in an effort to outline the ancient centers of agricultural diversity and 
guard against widespread hunger. Now, another remarkable scientist—and vivid 
storyteller—has retraced his footsteps.

In Where Our Food Comes From , Gary Paul Nabhan weaves together Vavilov's 
extraordinary story with his own expeditions to Earth's richest agricultural 
landscapes and the cultures that tend them. Retracing Vavilov's path from 
Mexico and the Colombian Amazon to the glaciers of the Pamirs in Tajikistan, 
he draws a vibrant portrait of changes that have occurred since Vavilov's 
time and why they matter.

In his travels, Nabhan shows how climate change, free trade policies, genetic 
engineering, and loss of traditional knowledge are threatening our food 
supply. Through discussions with local farmers, visits to local outdoor 
markets, and comparison of his own observations in eleven countries to those 
recorded in Vavilov's journals and photos, Nabhan reveals just how much 
diversity has already been lost. But he also shows what resilient farmers and 
scientists in many regions are doing to save the remaining living riches of 
our world.

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Renewing America's Food Traditions (with Ashley Rood), 2004

Where have all these heirloom vegetables and heritage breeds gone? When 
Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá wrote about visiting the Pueblos of New Mexico in 
1598, diversity on the farm and on the table was the norm—not the 
exception—across most of North America.

Today, roughly four hundred years later, two-thirds of the distinctive seeds 
and breeds which then fed America have vanished. One in fifteen wild, edible 
plant and animal species on this continent has diminished to the degree that 
it is now considered at risk. These declines in diversity bring losses in 
traditional ecological and culinary knowledge as well. Consequently, we have 
suffered declines in the food rituals which otherwise link communities to 
place and cultural heritage.
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Renewing America's Food Traditions
Saving and Savoring the Continent's Most Endangered Foods, 2008
Gary Paul Nabhan; Editor
Forwarded by: Deborah Madison
Released on: 04/01/2008

Renewing America's Food Traditions is a beautifully illustrated dramatic call 
to recognize, celebrate, and conserve the great diversity of foods that gives 
North America its distinctive culinary identity that reflects our 
multicultural heritage. It offers us rich natural and cultural histories as 
well as recipes and folk traditions associated with the rarest food plants 
and animals in North America. In doing so, it reminds us that what we choose 
to eat can either conserve or deplete the cornucopia of our continent.

While offering a eulogy to a once-common game food that has gone extinct—the 
passenger pigeon—the book doesn't dwell on tragic losses. Instead, it 
highlights the success stories of food recovery, habitat restoration, and 
market revitalization that chefs, farmers, ranchers, fishermen, and foresters 
have recently achieved. Through such “food parables,” editor Gary Paul Nabhan 
and his colleagues build a persuasive argument for eater-based conservation.
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Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods, 2001 - 
Paperback 2009

“Nabhan makes us understand how finding and eating local foods connects us 
deeply and sensually with where we are [and] why the everyday choices we make 
about food are the most important choices we make” --Alice Waters, chef owner 
of Chez Panisse

Since Coming Home to Eat was first published in 2001, the local food movement 
has exploded, and more people than ever are “going green” in an effort lead 
healthier, more eco-friendly lives. Gary Nabhan's year-long mission to eat 
only foods grown, fished, or gathered within 220 miles of his Arizona home 
offers striking, timely insights into our evolving relationship with food and 
place—and encourages us to redefine “eating close to home” as an act of deep 
cultural and environmental significance. As an avid gardener, ethnobotanist 
preserving seed diversity, and activist devoted to recovering native food 
traditions in the Southwest, Nabhan writes about his long campaign to raise 
awareness about food with contagious passion and humor.

“[Nabhan] offers a fascinating, enlightening, and moving account of his own 
experiences . . . prompting us to think twice about everything from the value 
of so-called ‘health foods' to the decline in the percentage of American 
families who have dinner together at home.” -- Los Angeles Times
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Enduring Seeds, 1989

In a series of beautifully written essays about Native American agriculture 
and wild plant conservation, Gary addresses the importance of conserving wild 
plants, the difficulties Native American peoples have had in preserving their 
agricultural traditions and current wild plant conservation efforts in North 
America.

"Gary Nabhan . . . is a seer and celebrant of the cultivated plant world 
before its defilement by modern agriculture. His interests and insights are 
as diverse as the wild seeds he gathers. Not only does he write beautifully 
about what he knows, he also goes out into the fields of native peoples 
collecting and conserving indigenous seeds, returning them to communities 
from which they have been lost. In words and actions, Nabhan aims to preserve 
no less than the 'remaining riches of the living world' ." - Gretel Ehrlich
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The Desert Smells Like Rain, 1982

In The Desert Smells Like Rain, ethnobiologist Gary Nabhan describes his 
visits with contemporary Papago Indians, the Tohono O'oodham or "Desert 
People". Drawing on his extensive scientific research and study of Papago 
folklore, as well as his years of work among the Desert People in village 
gardening and nutrition programs, Nabhan portrays a desert- adapted way of 
life that has persisted despite the pressures of modern civilization.

"Gary Nabhan's compassionate observation of Papago land ethics is important 
work, capable of broad application. He is a naturalist in the full sense of 
the word, because he has not forgotten the people." -Barry Lopez
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