At Climate Land Leaders, we try to make sense of our lives, agriculture, our land and our time through films, poems, podcasts, photos — and especially books. Here’s a Climate Land Leaders book list, with contributions from Mary Damm, Teresa Opheim, Jane Shey, Sylvia Spalding, Lee Tesdell and Paula Westmoreland. Several of these titles have been featured at the Climate Land Leaders’ book club discussions.
Three of Climate Land Leader Lee Tesdell’s favorites
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by adrienne maree brown
Dirt to Soil: One Family’s Journey to Regenerative Agriculture by Gabe Brown
The Indians of Iowa by Lance Foster
The One-Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming by Masanobu Fukuoka
The Road I Grew Up On by Helen Gunderson
The Land Remains: A Midwestern Perspective on Our Past and Future by Neil Hamilton
Bet the Farm: The Dollars and Sense of Growing Food in America by Beth Hoffman
Farming for Our Future: The Science, Law and Policy of Climate-Neutral Agriculture by Peter H. Lehner and Nathan A. Rosenberg
North Country: The Making of Minnesota by Mary Letherd Wingerd
A Farm Language: How a Sharecropper’s Son Discovered a World of Talking Plants, Smart Insects and the Power of Natural Solutions by Joe Lewis
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass is a seminal book for many Climate Land Leaders, including Paula Westmoreland
For the Love of Soil: Strategies to Regenerate Our Food Production Systems by Nicole Masters
Dirt: The Erosion of Civilization by David Montgomery
Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life by David Montgomery
White Birch, Red Hawthorn by Nora Murphy (the story of Murphy’s ancestors’ maple grove that, before the Irish arrived, was home to the Dakota, Ojibwe, and Ho-Chunk)
The Overstory by Richard Powers (a novel)
Water in Plain Sight: Building Soil, Restoring Land and Working with the Water Cycle for a Cooler, Wetter Planet by Judith Schwartz
This Perennial Land: Third Crops, Blue Earth and the Road to a Restorative Agriculture by Lansing Shepard and Paula Westmoreland
Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard
The Carbon Farming Solution: A Global Toolkit of Perennial Crops and Regenerative Agriculture Practices for Climate Change Mitigation and Food Security by Eric Toensmeier
Kinship Series: Belonging in a World of Relations edited by Gavin Van Horn, Robin Wall Kimmerer and John Hausdoerffer (five-volume set of essays)
The Farmer’s Lawyer: The North Dakota Nine and the Fight to Save the Family Farm by Sarah Vogel
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Mni Sota Makoce: The Land of the Dakota by Gwen Westerman
Ecologist and Climate Land Leader Mary Damm (pictured here at Seed Savers Exchange) is enthusiastic about Joe Lewis’s book A Farm Language
Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden: The Classic account of Hidatsa American Indian Gardening Techniques by Gilbert L. Wilson
Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World by Simon Winchester