These are texts that I have read recently (or keep coming back to) that I highly recommend. Some relate specifically to things I have written about, flesh out ideas or the general themes of the blog, or are just really good books.
食べられる野生植物大事典―草本・木本・シダ 橋本 郁三 柏書房 2007
Ikuzo Hashimoto. Wild Food Lexicon, Japan: A unique photgraphic guide to finding cooking and eating wild plants, ferns and lichen. 2007. (Japanese)
A good but not great book, I include it here as it is the best book that I have come across so far for wild foods in Japan. Information on an extensive range of food and medicinal plants, fungi and lichen. Information on preparation too. Unfortunately the book has some major failings: there are not images for all of the plants listed. Also, descriptions of plants for identification purposes are not the best and sometimes rather poor or entirely lacking. It does have indexes for both Japanese common and botanical names for the plants making cross referencing easy – a necessary feature for a field guide but often lacking in Japanese publications, many of which give no botanical names for plants at all. There are many different regional common names in Japan so having the botanical names is a great help. Not so much a field guide for identification purposes but more a lexicon of useful wild plants, as the title suggests. I hope to discover better guides but this is certainly the best addition to the library on Japanese wild foods and medicines to date.
Fukuoka, Masanobu. The Natural Way of Farming: The Theory and Practice of Green Philosophy. Japan Publications, 1985.
The best of Fukuoka’s books available in English translation. A profound philosophy in the guise of a theory of farming. Radical simplicity, rejection of industrial civilization, anti-work, de-domestication of our food supply…an ecocentric method of farming to re-establish natural abundance and balance.
Fukuoka summed up his approach brilliantly saying, if Nature were a bull then natural farming is to grab on to the bull by the tail, being thrown about wildly and going wherever the bull goes. He contrasted this with permaculture – sitting on the bull, holding onto its horns attempting to steer it, or biological agriculture – putting a ring through the bulls nose in order to lead it around.
The two other books by Fukuoka available in English translation, The Road Back to Nature: Regaining the Paradise Lost (Japan Publications, 1987) and The One Straw Revolution (Rodale, 1978), are also well worth reading but The Natural Way of Farming is definitely the best articulation of his philosophy.
Heinberg, Richard. The Primitivist Critique of Civilization.
Richard Heinberg, well known for his writings on peak oil (and peak everything), delivered this paper to a gathering of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations in 1995. Going beyond the myopic view of civilization as evolutionarily inevitable it is a good introductory essay to the arguments against civilization that continue to attract a growing number of adherents.
Pendell, Dale. Pharmako/Poeia: Power Plants, Poisons and Herbcraft. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2010.
A wonderfully written exploration of “the poison path.” The best thing I have read in a long time (although I could easily say that about a few other books too). If you’re a plant person or on that path an essential read. If you’re a “well developed plant person” you probably won’t need to read it but undoubtedly you’ll appreciate the poetry of it. This is the first part of a trilogy and I am eagerly awaiting the next volume Pharmako/Dynamis: Stimulating Plants, Potions & Herbcraft which will be arriving in my mailbox any day now. The final volume in the trilogy being Pharmako/Gnosis: Plant Teachers and the Poison Path. I bet they’re all fantastic. Dale Pendell’s website.
Buhner, Stephen Harrod. The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature. Rochester, VT: Bear & Company, 2004.
Another essential read for any aspiring plant person. This book really blew my mind when I first read it and I keep returning to it as there is much to be learnt here. The book looks at the process of learning the potentiality of a plant from the plant itself as all indigenous healers and plant people have always done. It was not hit and miss, random experimentation but rather communication, exchanges between plants and people (and animals) that taught “primitives” (and some notable moderns) about the uses of the plants around them. And, for all you sceptics, the first half of the book is a scientific explanation of how this process works.
Buhner, Stephen Harrod. Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers: The Secrets of Ancient Fermentation. Boulder: Siris Books, 1998.
Another wonderful book by Buhner. Lots of great recipes and fermentation histories. “Fermentation and plant use – as medicine, as psychotropics, as teachers, as companion’s on life’s path – are an inescapable part of our exploration of what it means to be human.”
More on Stephen Harrod Buhner.
Katz, Sandor Ellix. Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods. White River Junction: Chelsea Green, 2003.
While on the subject of fermentation… A great intro to a wide variety of ferments. Recipes cultured with food politics and social/environmental justice. Wildfermentation.com
Snyder, Gary. The Practice of the Wild. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990. [PDF]
Beautifully written (of course, its Gary Snyder!) essays relating to bioregionalism, deep ecology, being of a place. Distinguishing between nature and wilderness and tracing the implications of such a distinction.
Turnbull, Colin. The Forest People. London: Pimlico, 1993.
An account of anthropologist Colin Turnbull’s three years living with the Mbuti (pygmies) in the Ituri Forest, north-east Congo. Turnbull vividly portrays the daily life of the Mbuti – a way of life that resonated deeply with him. (Interestingly Turnbull’s first contact with the Mbuti occurred before he trained as an anthropologist.) Of particular interest to me was the contrast between the way of life of the Mbuti and that of the BaKpara – villager-farmers. A stark contrast between what Daniel Quinn has called Leaver and Taker cultures. To the Mbuti the forest is the world, the place from where all good things come. To the BaKpara the forest is the place where evil spirits dwell. It is to be feared and destroyed (“tamed, made “productive”).
