In The Edge of Extinction, Jules Pretty explores life and change in a dozen environments and cultures across the world, taking us on a series of remarkable journeys through deserts, coasts, mountains, steppes, snowscapes, marshes, and farms to show that there are many different ways to live in cooperation with nature. From these accounts of people living close to the land and close to the edge emerge a larger story about sustainability and the future of the planet. Pretty addresses not only current threats to natural and cultural diversity but also the unsustainability of modern lifestyles typical of industrialized countries. In a very real sense, Pretty discovers, what we manage to preserve now may well save us later. 
Jules Pretty’s travels take him among the Māori people along the coasts of the Pacific, into the mountains of China, and across petroglyph-rich deserts of Australia. He treks with nomads over the continent-wide steppes of Tuva in southern Siberia, walks and boats in the wildlife-rich inland swamps of southern Africa, and experiences the Arctic with ice fishermen in Finland. He explores the coasts and inland marshes of eastern England and Northern Ireland and accompanies Innu people across the taiga’s snowy forests and the lakes of the Labrador interior. Pretty concludes his global journey immersed in the discrete cultures and landscapes embedded within the American landscape: the small farms of the Amish, the swamps of the Cajuns in the deep South, and the deserts of California. 
The diverse people Pretty meets in The Edge of Extinction display deep pride in their relationships with the land and are only willing to join with the modern world on their own terms. By the examples they set, they offer valuable lessons for anyone seeking to find harmony in a world cracking under the pressures of apparently insatiable consumption patterns of the affluent.

The Edge of Extinction: Travels with Enduring People in Vanishing Lands

Politics & Social Sciences

Pretty, Jules

Social Sciences

Comstock Publishing Associates

Over the course of a year, Jules Pretty walked along the shoreline of East Anglia in southeastern England, eventually exploring four hundred miles on foot (and another hundred miles by boat). It is a coast and a culture that is about to be lost―not yet, perhaps, but soon―to rising tides and industrial sprawl. This Luminous Coast takes the reader with him on his journey over land and water; over sea walls of dried grass, beside stretched fields of golden crops, alongside white sails gliding across the intricate lacework of invisible creeks and estuaries, under vast skies that are home to curlews and redshanks and the outpourings of skylarks. 
East Anglia’s coastline is as much a human landscape as it is a natural one, and Pretty is equally perceptive about the region’s cultural heritage and its "industrial wild": fishing villages and the modern seaside resorts, family farms and oil refineries, pleasure piers and concrete seawalls, cozy pubs and military installations. Through words and photographs, Pretty interweaves stories of the land and sea with people past and present. He is a passionate and sensitive guide to a region in transition, under stress, and perhaps even doomed, as finely attuned to its history as he is to its unique sensory world.

This Luminous Coast: Walking England's Eastern Edge

History

Europe

The Low-Carbon Good Life (Routledge-SCORAI Studies in Sustainable Consumption)

The Low-Carbon Good Life is about how to reverse and repair four interlocking crises arising from modern material consumption: the climate crisis, growing inequality, biodiversity loss and food-related ill-health. Across the world today and throughout history, good lives are characterised by healthy food, connections to nature, being active, togetherness, personal growth, a spiritual framework and sustainable consumption. A low-carbon good life offers opportunities to live in ways that will bring greater happiness and contentment. Slower ways of living await. A global target of no more than one tonne of carbon per person would allow the poorest to consume more and everyone to find our models of low-carbon good lives. But dropping old habits is hard, and large-scale impacts will need fresh forms of public engagement and citizen action. Local to national governments need to act; equally, they need pushing by the power and collective action of citizens. Innovative and engaging and written in a style that combines storytelling with scientific evidence, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change, sustainability, environmental economics and sustainable consumption, as well as non-specialist readers concerned about the climate crisis.

Business & Money

Economics

Routledge

Sustainable Intensification of Agriculture (Earthscan Food and Agriculture)

Sustainable intensification (SI) has emerged in recent years as a powerful new conceptualisation of agricultural sustainability and has been widely adopted in policy circles and debates. It is defined as a process or system where yields are increased without adverse environmental impact and without the cultivation of more land.  Co-written by Jules Pretty, one of the pioneers of the concept and internationally known and respected authority on sustainable agriculture, this book sets out current thinking and debates around sustainable agriculture and intensification. It recognises that world population is increasing rapidly, so that yields must increase on finite land and other resources to maintain food security. It provides the first widely accessible overview of the concept of SI as an innovative approach to agriculture and as a key element in the transition to a green economy. It presents evidence from around the world to show how various innovations are improving yields, resilience and farm incomes, particularly for ‘resource constrained’ smallholders in developing countries, but also in the developed world. It shows how SI is a fundamental departure from previous models of agricultural intensification. It also highlights the particular role and potential of small-scale farmers and the fundamental importance of social and human capital in designing and spreading effective innovations.

Sustainable Intensification of Agriculture: Greening the World's Food Economy (Earthscan Food and Agriculture)

Bharucha, Zareen Pervez

Reference

Sustainable intensification (SI) has emerged in recent years as a powerful new conceptualisation of agricultural sustainability and has been widely adopted in policy circles and debates. It is defined as a process or system where yields are increased without adverse environmental impact and without the cultivation of more land. Co-written by Jules Pretty, one of the pioneers of the concept and internationally known and respected authority on sustainable agriculture, this book sets out current thinking and debates around sustainable agriculture and intensification. It recognises that world population is increasing rapidly, so that yields must increase on finite land and other resources to maintain food security. It provides the first widely accessible overview of the concept of SI as an innovative approach to agriculture and as a key element in the transition to a green economy. It presents evidence from around the world to show how various innovations are improving yields, resilience and farm incomes, particularly for ‘resource constrained’ smallholders in developing countries, but also in the developed world. It shows how SI is a fundamental departure from previous models of agricultural intensification. It also highlights the particular role and potential of small-scale farmers and the fundamental importance of social and human capital in designing and spreading effective innovations.

The East Country is a work of creative nonfiction in which the acclaimed nature writer Jules Pretty integrates memoir, natural history, cultural critique, and spiritual reflection into a single compelling narrative. Pretty frames his book around Aldo Leopold and his classic A Sand County Almanac, bringing Leopold’s ethic―that some could live without nature but most should not―into the twenty-first century. In The East Country, Pretty follows the seasons through seventy-four tales set in a variety of landscapes from valley to salty shore. Pretty convinces us that we should all develop long attachments to the local, observing that the land can change us for the better. (Steve Russell East Anglian Daily Times)

The East Country: Almanac Tales of Valley and Shore

'Jules Pretty brings together the most comprehensive and carefully selected collection of writings available about sustainable agriculture. Together with an excellent overview chapter, the collected works provide the best available source for an enlightened analysis and debate about sustainability in agriculture. The four volumes will serve both as an excellent reader for students and a unique reference for all with an interest in the pursuit of sustainabiity in the food system' Professor Per Pinstrup-Andersen, Cornell University, former Chair of CGIAR Science Council and World Food Prize Laureate, 2001 'This is the single most comprehensive overview of sustainable agriculture, from ancient beginnings to the most topical modern issues. Jules Pretty has assembled a marvellous collection of the most seminal papers that are driving sustainable agriculture in all parts of the world.' Jeffrey A. McNeely, Chief Scientist, IUCN-The World Conservation Union 'Showing that, after all, humans can learn from experience, Jules Pretty has woven together the best of the old with the best of what is new and visionary. He gives us a solid, knowledge-based foundation for a badly needed new paradigm - that of an agriculture which sustains all life into the longer term. The impressive list of contributors ensures that all relevant areas have been competently assessed... A unique reference work for teachers, students and practitioners.' Hans R. Herren, World Food Prize Laureate, 1995 'An ambitious and deeply insightful series that unites the great minds not just of the agricultural, nutrition and environmental sciences, but also history, culture, economics, technology, learning and communications, policy, regulatory and institutional approaches. It will be a major reference work for all interested in the future of humanity and sustainable food and agricultural systems.' Parviz Koohafkan, Director, Environment, Climate Change and Bioenergy Division, FAO, Italy 'This work presents a body of knowledge that has come of age. It takes into account not only the science but also human behaviour, institutions and politics. It will be an invaluable support for practices that are rapidly gaining significance.' Professor Neils R�ling, formerly of Wageningen University, The Netherlands This 4-volume set, edited by the world's leading expert on agricultural sustainability, brings together and interprets the most influential, important and time-tested international scholarship across the fields of agriculture and food production with a set overview and individual volume introductions that make sense of this diverse and complex field. Volume I covers the history of agriculture from its ancient origins through successive technological and institutional revolutions to the present. Volume II examines the relationship between agriculture and the environment including agricultural contamination, greenhouse gases and climate change, environmental improvements and sustainability, integrated farming, eco-agriculture and agro-ecology, landscape restoration and environmental goods and services. Volume III provides full coverage of the modern industrialized global food system, corporate control, poverty, hunger and international successes, failures and challenges, diet and health, consumer behaviour and local alternatives to industrialization. Volume IV addresses how we think about land and our relationship to it, governance and stewardship of the rural commons, systems thinking, ecological literacy, social connections and a sustainable rural life, supportive and perverse agricultural subsidies and policies that shape food poverty and sustain agriculture into the future.

Sustainable Agriculture and Food (Earthscan Reference Collections)

For most of human history, we have lived our daily lives in a close relationship with the land. Yet now, for the first time, more people are living in urban rather than rural areas, bringing about an estrangement. This book, by acclaimed author Jules Pretty, is fundamentally about our relationship with nature, animals and places. A series of interlinked essays leads readers on a voyage that weaves through the themes of connection and estrangement between humans and nature. The journey shows how our modern lifestyles and economies would need six or eight Earths if the entire worlds population adopted our profligate ways. Pretty shows that we are rendering our own world inhospitable and so risk losing what it means to be human: unless we make substantial changes, Gaia threatens to become Grendel. Ultimately, however, the book offers glimpses of an optimistic future for humanity, in the very face of climate change and pending global environmental catastrophe.

The Earth Only Endures

For most of human history, we have lived our daily lives in a close relationship with the land. Yet now, for the first time, more people are living in urban rather than rural areas, bringing about an estrangement. This book, by acclaimed author Jules Pretty, is fundamentally about our relationship with nature, animals and places. A series of interlinked essays leads readers on a voyage that weaves through the themes of connection and estrangement between humans and nature. The journey shows how our modern lifestyles and economies would need six or eight Earths if the entire world�s population adopted our profligate ways. Pretty shows that we are rendering our own world inhospitable and so risk losing what it means to be human: unless we make substantial changes, Gaia threatens to become Grendel. Ultimately, however, the book offers glimpses of an optimistic future for humanity, in the very face of climate change and pending global environmental catastrophe.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Pretty, Jules. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Pretty, Jules

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Pretty, Jules. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Edge of Extinction: Travels with Enduring People in Vanishing Lands

This Luminous Coast: Walking England's Eastern Edge

The Low-Carbon Good Life (Routledge-SCORAI Studies in Sustainable Consumption)

The Low-Carbon Good Life (Routledge-SCORAI Studies in Sustainable Consumption)

Sustainable Intensification of Agriculture: Greening the World's Food Economy (Earthscan Food and Agriculture)

Sustainable Intensification of Agriculture (Earthscan Food and Agriculture)

The East Country: Almanac Tales of Valley and Shore

Sustainable Agriculture and Food (Earthscan Reference Collections)

The Earth Only Endures

The Earth Only Endures