At nature's pace

Gene Logsdon's essays on farming and the American dream, on rural society and the need for agricultural reform, have made him one of America's most important critics of large-scale farming. In At Nature's Pace Logsdon explains why today's single-crop megafarms - and the urban communities that depend on them - are headed toward an economic and biological crisis. As the environmental movement matures, its work with wilderness and with the preservation of biodiversity will need to be balanced with proposals for appropriate human uses of the planet. Agriculture and other issues involving rural life can serve as both practical examples and valuable metaphors for us in developing a sustainable human life on Earth . Logsdon travels to Amish country, to a community whose care of the land and integration of business with family life offers important lessons. Later he discovers throughout America a renaissance of agricultural awareness - suburban minifarms, organic farmers, and urban gardeners. "I hope readers of these essays will come to share the vision I had as I wrote them," he says, "that sustainable farms are to today's headlong rush toward the earth's destruction what monasteries were to the Dark Ages: places to preserve human skills and arts until some semblance of common sense and common purpose return to the public mind.". Logsdon reminds us that healthy agricultural practices can work only at nature's pace, grounded in a reverence for the land and for biological efficiency that transcends technological shortsightedness. These essays together offer both inspiration and instruction for nurturing life on Earth.