Participating in Nature teaches you how to stay warm and comfortable without a sleeping bag, how to start a fire by friction, and how to build a reliable shelter from natural materials. Includes the self-reliance skills of fishing by hand, cooking edible plants, felting with wool, and making stone knives, wooden containers, willow baskets, and cordage.

Participating in Nature teaches you how to stay warm and comfortable without a sleeping bag, how to start a fire by friction, and how to build a reliable shelter from natural materials. Thomas J. Elpel extensively researched self-reliance skills, including fishing by hand, cooking edible plants, felting with wool, and making stone knives, wooden containers, willow baskets, and cordage. Nearly 200 photographs and sketches demonstrate these outdoor skills.

Over the past one hundred years in particular, there has been a steady process by which natural resources (such as ground-water, forests, fishing grounds and grazing land) have been increasingly managed by centralised institutions. Governments and other national agencies have argued that this promotes efficiency, equity, and other wide national goals. Recently this orthodoxy has been challenged by rising numbers of experiments that show how centralised management tends to fail. Global, national and local goals are more likely to be met, at lower cost and with other benefits (such as promoting better democratic institutions) by involving local populations in collaborative management agreements. This volume, based on detailed case studies from around the world, subjects some of these experiments to critical study, and suggests limits to the participative approach as well as ways it can be improved and made suitable for new contexts.

Building with Nature is a proven, innovative approach to create water-related Nature-based Solutions for societal challenges, that harnesses the forces of nature to benefit the environment, economy and society.00EcoShape, a unique collaboration between scientists, engineers, builders, designers and not-for-profits, has in the past decade designed, realized, monitored and researched multiple Building with Nature projects in Europe (especially in the Netherlands) and South East Asia. These projects demonstrate the capacity to build Nature-Based Solutions at scale to create safe and sustainable flood protection as well as ecologically rich and resilient environments that provide great places to live, work, and visit. These characteristics make Building with Nature the go-to method to adapt to and mitigate climate change.00In this book, EcoShape brings the authors into dialogue with experts and stakeholders to discuss methodologies and lessons learned about Building with Nature as well as potential barriers and enablers for implementation. It describes and illustrates key concepts, linking them to a range of landscape types and their underlying ecological, economic, and social systems. As such, the book is more than a manual; it captures the imaginative and inspirational potential of Building with Nature.

The instant New York Times bestseller | A Washington Post Notable Book | One of NPR's Best Books of the Year “Expert storytelling . . . [Pollan] masterfully elevates a series of big questions about drugs, plants and humans that are likely to leave readers thinking in new ways.” —New York Times Book Review From #1 New York Times bestselling author Michael Pollan, a radical challenge to how we think about drugs, and an exploration into the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants—and the equally powerful taboos. Of all the things humans rely on plants for—sustenance, beauty, medicine, fragrance, flavor, fiber—surely the most curious is our use of them to change consciousness: to stimulate or calm, fiddle with or completely alter, the qualities of our mental experience. Take coffee and tea: People around the world rely on caffeine to sharpen their minds. But we do not usually think of caffeine as a drug, or our daily use as an addiction, because it is legal and socially acceptable. So, then, what is a “drug”? And why, for example, is making tea from the leaves of a tea plant acceptable, but making tea from a seed head of an opium poppy a federal crime? In This Is Your Mind on Plants, Michael Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs—opium, caffeine, and mescaline—and throws the fundamental strangeness, and arbitrariness, of our thinking about them into sharp relief. Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs while consuming (or, in the case of caffeine, trying not to consume) them, Pollan reckons with the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants. Why do we go to such great lengths to seek these shifts in consciousness, and then why do we fence that universal desire with laws and customs and fraught feelings? In this unique blend of history, science, and memoir, as well as participatory journalism, Pollan examines and experiences these plants from several very different angles and contexts, and shines a fresh light on a subject that is all too often treated reductively—as a drug, whether licit or illicit. But that is one of the least interesting things you can say about these plants, Pollan shows, for when we take them into our bodies and let them change our minds, we are engaging with nature in one of the most profound ways we can. Based in part on an essay published almost twenty-five years ago, this groundbreaking and singular consideration of psychoactive plants, and our attraction to them through time, holds up a mirror to our fundamental human needs and aspirations, the operations of our minds, and our entanglement with the natural world.

Renowned conservationist Aldo Leopold once wrote, "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it does otherwise." Few have taken Leopold's vision more to heart than Steven I. Apfelbaum, who has, over the last thirty years, transformed his eighty-acre Stone Prairie Farm in Wisconsin into a biologically diverse ecosystem of prairie, wetland, spring-fed brook, and savanna. In healing his land, Apfelbaum demonstrates how humans might play a starring role in healing the planet.