Ten great books!

Over the last few years I have lifted my reading game substantially (okay, it was from a very low base). Most of the books I’ve been reading sit outside of my regular architecture and design obsessions but - probably precisely because they do - have fuelled a deep and enlightened sense of purpose.

I can honestly say that the wisdom gleaned from this reading has catalysed the significant change we are making in our lifestyle, work-life balance and broader practices.

Below are a series of short reviews covering ten books that Suzy and I have recently read, and found transformative. Highly recommended if you are lost for a read!

Doughnut Economics

‘This century needs economic thinking that unleashes regenerative design in order to create a circular – not linear – economy, and to restore humans as full participants in Earth’s cyclical processes of life.’

Author and academic Kate Raworth pulls together progressive thinking from a range of disciplines into a new economic model she calls the Doughnut. Doughnut Economics rebuilds the foundations of economics, away from linear GDP growth targets of 3% (which clearly can’t be sustained on a finite planet) to a circular economic model of flows, feedback loops and balances.

Drawing concepts of abundance and regenerative behaviour into the foundations of her new model, Raworth reconstructs an economic model of interrelationships between a Social Foundation of twelve social dimensions and an Ecological Ceiling of nine planetary boundaries.

What we found particularly valuable in this book is the way Raworth re-looks at traditional economic logic through measures of ‘value’ rather than pursuit of ‘gain’. Rather than focus on the throughflow of monetary value (eg GDP), Doughnut Economics will monitor numerous sources of wealth – human, social, ecological, cultural and physical – that are at their most valuable when their interdependencies are healthy - Economy as ecology if you will!

Call of the Reed Warbler

‘The common citizen is politically orphaned in a world shaped by corporate rule – farmers’ rights and people’s rights to food are extinguished - in short, ‘consumerism lubricates the war against the earth.’

In Australia “national security analysts warn that 3ºC warming may result in outright social chaos, and 4ºC is considered incompatible with the maintenance of human civilisation.“ If these predictions are only partially true, securing the most fundamental of human needs - food, water and shelter - will be a daily concern for many.

Charles Massey’s opus looks at the regenerative potential of new agricultural practices as a means of healing degraded landscapes, water ways and ecologies. In doing so Call of the Reed Warbler also brings profound importance to our relationship with what we eat, both before we eat it (culturally) and after we eat it (nutritionally).

Reading this book awakened me to the critical relationships between agriculture, place and humanity. It brought close attention the fact that we eat every day, but, thanks to the global economy, the food we eat is so often disconnected from the landscapes we inhabit. More-so, Call of the Reed Warbler helped me understand country, describing water and nutrient flows unique to the Australian landscape whilst offering the hope of regeneration as humans undergo ‘a phase-shift in consciousness to a newly Emergent mind.’

Retrosuburbia

‘A retrofit of homes, gardens and lifestyles to be more self-reliant and resilient within the household and local neighbourhood.’

The density of the suburb represents a sustainability sweet spot where people live close enough to build and maintain community, but with enough space around them to raise their own plants and animals. RetroSuburbia anticipates an evolved suburbia, optimised for a post-carbon, energy-decent future where humanity can thrive with nature.

RetroSuburbia was written by David Holmgren and published in 2018. David is the original founder of Permaculture with Bill Mollison back in 70’s Australia. The book is a very practical guide to transforming yourself and your place to be lower-impact with higher resilience. RetroSuburbia is structured in three major parts corresponding to three ‘Fields’ of action - Built, Biological and Behavioural.

RetroSuburbia emphasises change as an incremental process or retro-fit where households can leverage existing resources and community networks as they transition. The book is loaded with helpful resources and tips to get you on your way.

What we love about RetroSuburbia is the way it demonstrates through theory, hypothetical and real-world examples, how Permaculture principles can be applied in everyday life and in a generalist, non-preachy way. The global climate crisis and repercussions of the Covid-19 pandemic make RetroSuburbia a must-read in my view.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

‘A food culture is not something that gets sold to people. It arises out of a place, a soil, a climate, a history, a temperament… a collective sense of belonging.’

In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle Barbara Kingsolver sets a food-focused challenge for her family - To live for one whole year, solely off food grown and produced on their own property.

AVM takes you on a journey of home-grown food production, where the reader shares in the failures and successes of this altruistic experiment. But the book doesn’t only focus on the growing, harvesting, preserving, cooking and eating of food. AVM also investigates the intrinsic bind these processes have with the culture of communities and families, the flows of the seasons, budget limits, skill-sets and so on.

Kingsolver has a beautiful turn of phrase and AVM was particularly impactful on us for it’s elegant warts-and-all approach. Our own expectations have been simultaneously tempered and driven by this page-turner.

Kingsolver says We can’t know what we haven’t been taught. and learning how Kingsolver and her family unearth and apply knowledge on food self-sufficiency is the greatest gift we took from the book.

Dark Emu

‘Aboriginals did build houses, did cultivate and irrigate crops, did sew clothes and were not hapless wanderers across the soil, mere hunter-gatherers. Aboriginals were intervening in the productivity of the country and what they learnt during that process over many thousands of years will be useful to us today. To deny Aboriginal agricultural and spiritual achievement is the single greatest impediment to inter-cultural understanding and, perhaps, Australian moral and economic prosperity.’

Read Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe to understand the country you live on, to decolonize and re-code your understanding of our history and to more deeply comprehend these incredible people and their place - A coexistence of integrated and sophisticated harmony that has persisted for over 50,000 years.

Dark Emu debunks colonial history that describes indigenous Australians as simple nomadic hunter-gatherer people. It does this by evidencing numerous and correlated records of pre-colonial construction, farming and detailed engineering.

We love Dark Emu for it’s capacity to restore pride and meaning in the lives of indigenous Australian people. Through it’s accessible language we also see value in how Dark Emu can attract and inform a broad audience. Dark Emu is also great for it’s forward-looking stance. Pascoe sets out a road map for more sustainable agriculture and farming practices in Australia that are informed by long-ignored and suppressed knowledge.

Designing Regenerative Cultures

‘Everything changes if we change the way we think.’

Author Daniel Wahl believes a fundamental redesign of culture is exactly what is needed to transform the impending breakdown into an exciting opportunity for breakthrough. Through an emergent regenerative culture – ‘a culture that aims to leave a richer, more vibrant and more ecologically productive planet to each subsequent generation’ – Wahl envisions a more beautiful world than the current one we are failing to sustain with much sacrifice.

Designing Regenerative Cultures will take you out of your comfort zone and allow you to see the design profession through a fresh, optimistic and invigorating lens. The book brings together current and emerging best practice in transformative innovation, biologically inspired design, health and resilience, and living systems thinking.

The primary arguments of the book coalesce into a reimagined worldview, where thinking is done reiteratively through systems and feedback loops (rather than in isolated silos) where humans evolve to be more responsive and less controlling.

If you are in a mid-career crisis and looking for a way to reinvent yourself with a deeper sense of purpose, then you will likely find some new direction inside. If you are feeling overwhelmed by the collective task of turning spaceship Earth around, then Wahl’s book will give you hope.

Hope in the Dark

‘Hope is not about what we expect. It is an embrace of the essential unknowability of the world, of the breaks with the present, the surprises…
People have always been good at imagining the end of the world, which is much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of change in a world without end.’

Start with this book if you’re completely overwhelmed by the state of the world right now.

Hope in the Dark chronicles the history of change around the darkest moments of despair that humanity has witnessed. It demonstrates that throughout history, the cultural transformation that at first seems insurmountable - slavery, racism, sexism etc - can be, and is achieved. And that very quickly, views that were long marginalised to the ideology of resistance and struggle cement as cultural norms. Seemingly overnight the views of our parents become unfathomably archaic.

‘What looks perfectly ordinary after the fact would often have seemed like a miracle before it.’

Solnit demonstrates how perpetually malleable human culture is, but also how society rarely yields to change without a struggle. She unpacks the histories of activism and change as a reminder of how very much human hope has been fulfilled in the past. Hope in the Dark aims to inspire the struggles of the present day - things do change, they are changing right now and change is inevitable and achievable in the future.

Solnit urges factional groups within a struggle to respect their nuances and unite under the bigger issues. A triumphant success is first seeded by imbuing peace, respect, creativity and democracy in your own activism.

‘We are not who we were not very long ago.’

The Life of Plants

‘The plant world constitutes a reservoir in which volatile solar rays are skilfully frozen and made available for use.’

In The Life of Plants Emanuele Coccia takes a philosophical perspective on ecologies elevating the significance of plants through their pre-conditioning for the emergence of animals. Coccia’s words force the reader to reconceptualise and in doing so trigger a recalibration of perception and values.

For Coccia the Earth’s atmosphere is a sea. We don’t live in our dwellings but we live immersed in the atmosphere, as fish live immersed in the ocean - a sea of life. This sea is a mixture of the breath of all living things. Plants exhale oxygen and in offering up this, and their flesh as food, enslave animals to replenish the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and feed their roots with their scat. The animal kingdom cannot survive without plants.

Coccia claims that for aeons, philosophers have written the plant world out of philosophy, overlooking the importance of plants more out on contempt than neglect.

I found The Life of Plants an incredibly stimulating read. Since finishing the book working in the garden with plants has become a transcendent pleasure as I cultivate a small margin of their eternal, indifferent world.

The art of Frugal Hedonism

‘The basic blueprint for modern first-world living is normalized hyper-abundance and hyper-stimulation, punctuated by desperate attempts at escape when the fallout becomes too distressing... Frugal Hedonism inverts this pattern by normalizing an elegant sufficiency of consumption, and then artfully dotting it with intensely relished abundance.’

Annie Raser-Rowland and Adam Grubb take us on a highly entertaining (side-splitting at times) read that will surely help nudge you off the capitalist treadmill.

At the heart of The Art of Frugal Hedonism is a critique of human culture and our herd mentality. The book offers so many terrific little lessons to help recalibrate your life - Value simplicity; Achieve that ‘new’ feeling through discovery rather than consumption; Carry a bag (food, water, book) rather than a wallet; Live smaller; Own or share quality and repairable things… and so on.

Yes, some of the bigger challenges in subverting everyday life are glossed over, such as How do I afford housing if I am slowing down, doing less paid work and bartering? But really, there is opportunity to dip into these great ideas ranging from as little as you like to as much as you can.

Milkwood

‘The skills that we learn bind our lives together.’

We love the Milkwood book for it’s deep dive into some very interesting and useful topics. And also because Kirsten and Nick are just truly awesome people!

‘Real skills for down-to-earth living’ is an apt subtitle and exactly what the Milkwood book offers. Kirsten and Nick wrote Milkwood whilst living at Melliodora with Permaculture guru David Holmgren, so the book has fine pedigree but remains accessible, well laid out and targeted at noobs (like us) with a descriptive, plain-speak tone.

Each of the five chapters - The Tomato; Mushroom Cultivation; Natural Beekeeping; Seaweed and Wild Food - goes through the what, why and how of collection or cultivation followed by mouthwatering recipes to keep you focused. So far we have relied on the Tomato and Seaweed chapters but have Mushrooms and Bees on the near horizon.

In addition to being an immensely practical book Milkwood is beautifully designed and illustrated. If you are embarking on a more home-grown DIY life then we strongly recommend adding this book to your library.

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Written by Adam, March 2020