FOREWORD

hirty years ago Chelsea Green began its life in the refurbished ell of a
white clapboard house in Chelsea, Vermont, on the towns south green,
adjacent to the Orange County Courthouse. We began by publishing three
books a year, doubling our output to six over the next three years. Not a lot
of books, but each was scrupulously attended to.
From the outset we worked with the instincts of craftspeople: Each book
was unique and each made very individual demands on us as the authors
collaborators. Publishing, in our eyes, was a co-creative process. We were
editorially and design-driven. We still are.
From the start our books were nationally noticed, garnering positive
reviews and accolades and awards for our authors.
The company not only endured, but held on and eventually prospered
through one of the most tumultuous periods of the publishing industrys
five-hundred-year-old history, as the technological revolution known as the
Internet shook (and still shakes) the entire industry to its foundations.
We were also a bit wild: In our first six years we published an illustrated
fable, three novels, a photographic travel book, a biographical guide to Parisian cemeteries, several nature books, an art book, two or three memoirs,
and a poetry book.
Jean Gionos The Man Who Planted Trees, illustrated with wood engravings by Michael McCurdy, published in our first year and still in print, went
on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies over the years and set the tone
for what we hoped to achieve. The storys hero, Elzard Bouffier, served as a
kind of lodestar, an example, for us as we struggled to find our own way in
a highly changeable world.
To this day Gionos story is powerful and inspiring to readers who wish
to shape a better world. It has inspired at least two of our subsequent books:
Alan Weismans Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World (1998), about
the legendary architect and activist Paolo Lugaris creation of a village of
disaffected engineers and tinkerers who make revolutionary low-cost and
low-impact technologies in the empty llanos of eastern Colombia. And Julia
Alvarezs A Cafecito Story (2001), with woodcuts by Belkis Ramrez, which
tells the story of a man who learns how coffee is grown and is empowered
in the process.
Despite our varied interests we saw ourselves as an environmentally conscious publisherand suggested that by the use of the word Green in our

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name. We valued things that were rural and decentralized, nature for its
own sake, alternative ways of getting energy, growing food, and building
shelterin short, a culture that involved more beauty and less violence.
In 1989 we published the first of Eliot Colemans books, The New
Organic Grower, which went on to become one of the companys biggest
revenue generators and helped establish the nations organic, local agriculture and food movement. As Janisse Ray wrote many years later in her book
The Seed Underground (2012): ...the farmer in all of us has roused.
That same year we published our first political book, The Vermont Papers
by political scientist Frank Bryan and policy analyst John McClaughry, a
book the Los Angeles Times proclaimed was the Small Is Beautiful of American Politics. It was the first and only political book until much later in our
story. But it, too, sparked an interest and a commitment in an important subject area that the company would eventually nurture and develop more fully.
By 1995, with the publication of Paul Gipes Wind Power, Donella
Meadowss, Jorgen Randerss, and Dennis Meadowss Beyond the Limits,
Eliot Colemans Four-Season Harvest, Michael Pottss The Independent
Home, Gene Logsdons The Contrary Farmer, and Athena and Bill Steens
and David Bainbridges The Straw Bale House (one of our all-time bestsellers), Chelsea Green had created its niche as a publisher of books about
sustainable living. The company had become not only more focused but also
profitable. These were, each in its own way, pioneering titles; many of them
were revised in the ensuing years and still sell as bedrock backlist titles. The
backlist, books that sell over years and decades, are the sine qua non of any
publisher, its spine if you will. The backlist helps pay the bills each month,
making it possible to take a leap of faith with new, unproven, but promising
authors and important ideas that we hope will someday make good backlist
titles in their own right.
Chelsea Green has always had a nose for authors and subjects that are way
ahead of the cultural curve. In 1991 we published Wolfgang Zuckermanns
End of the Road, about reducing car dependency and calming urban traffic (a bit too far ahead of the curve, as it turned out). During the mid-1990s
we began exploring the growing topic of permaculture, and co-published or
distributed books from overseas before publishing some of the first American books on the subject like Gaias Garden by Toby Hemenway and Edible
Forest Gardens, the definitive two-volume reference on theory and design by
Dave Jacke and Eric Toensmeier. Today permaculture is much more widely
recognized, and it remains one of Chelsea Greens core subject areas. In
1997 we published a book about the now au courant subject of hemp farm-

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ing, and in 1999, the first book about community-supported agriculture,

Elizabeth Hendersons Sharing the Harvest, now in a revised edition.
This short list would not be complete without mentioning Sandor Katzs
Wild Fermentation, which has become one of our all-time bestselling titles,
despite being way ahead of the curve when we published it in 2003. By
2012, almost a full decade later, fermented food had entered the mainstream
consciousness, and Sandor Katzs third Chelsea Green book, The Art of
Fermentation, made it onto The New York Times bestseller list.
In 2004, under my wife Margos leadership, Chelsea Green expanded
its mission to include the politicsas well as the practiceof sustainable
living. We published cognitive linguist George Lakoffs Dont Think of an
Elephant!, about how significant the framing of ideas and values is to the
successful conduct of politics, releasing the book just in time to make the
pre-presidential-election conversation. It instantly took off, becoming the
first of our four New York Times bestsellers, staying on the list for over
a year and selling hundreds of thousands of copies. Three years later we
published our second New York Times bestseller, Naomi Wolfs The End of
America, warning Americans about the danger posed by the encroachment
of corporate state power in their everyday lives and the consequent erosion
of their civil rights.
In three decades weve been privileged to work with a great many talented
and diverse authors. Some attracted us by their passionate commitment
and personal heroism, in the fearless, persevering spirit of Elzard Bouffier himself. One such author is shrimper-activist-writer Diane Wilson. An
Unreasonable Woman (2005) is Dianes story of her against-all-odds battle
with a giant chemical plant that she single-handedly forced to stop polluting
the Gulf waters of her beloved Seadrift, Texas. Another is biologist-fisherwoman-activist Riki Ott, whose excruciating storyNot One Drop
(2008)is about the near-complete destruction of the fishing community of
Cordova, Alaska, by the Exxon Valdez supertankers massive oil spill, and
about the protracted struggle of the citizens of Cordova to claim restitution
from one of the worlds largest and most powerful corporations.
We were privileged to also work with such outstanding human beings
and scientists as Donella Meadows (19412001) and Lynn Margulis
(19382011). Donella was the lead author of the original Limits to Growth
that shook the world over forty years ago and continues to influence people
worldwide through the two editions we subsequently published in 1992
and 2004. Her posthumously published book Thinking in Systems (2006)

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is one of our top-selling titles and leads our growing ebook sales list. Lynn
Margulis was the co-creator, with James Lovelock, of Gaia theory, and one
of the worlds foremost exponents of an emergent theory of evolution that
emphasizes the role of symbiosis in the unfolding mystery of life. We are
proud to have published several of the books Lynn wrote during the last
years of her extraordinary life as a scientist.
Over three decades Chelsea Green has published more than four hundred titles and worked with writers of varying kinds, all of whom have had
original and worthy things to share, either as writers or as practitioners of
special trades and disciplinesand sometimes both. Less than a quarter of
these writers and their books are represented in this reader, an unavoidable
limitation! Some of the writers selected here have written bestselling books;
more of them, mid-list books; and some, books that didnt sell well at all.
Yet each has commanded our interest and commitment as a publisher to
help her or him realize what they want to say to the world.
As you read the short introductions to each author in this Reader you
will see many of the books have won various national awards in their fields.
The first book we published to win a national awardthe John Burroughs
Medal for a distinguished book of natural historywas Lawrence Kilhams On Watching Birds, which won in 1989. (In 2012 another Chelsea
Green author, Edward Hoagland, won the medal for his Sex and the River
Styx.) Lawrence Kilham died in 2000, but his son Ben is the author of In the
Company of Bears, released in paperback this fall of 2014. Two generations,
father and son, now live under one publishers roof.
What then of the future? Does an independent publisher still have a role to
play in a future dominated by the phenomenon of Internet-based self-publishing? In 2009 three of every four new books released were self-published.
With an expected three billion online users by 2015, why wouldnt all
authors simply create or beef up their own websites and join the herd? As
the august publisher and editor Jason Epstein has reminded us, Digitization makes possible a world in which anyone can claim to be a publisher,
and asks who will winnow what is worth keeping in a virtual marketplace
where Keats nightingale shares electronic space with Aunt Marys haikus?
The life of an independent publisher, believe it or not, has been made easier by the presence of the Internet and such entrepreneurial wizards as Jeff
Bezos. No backlist title need now fear going out of printever. Everyone
in the world has access to whatever book we publish, not only in an ebook
format but, with print-on-demand technology, as a printed copy.

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The question of our future relevance, however, will not be answered by

us. Only our authors, past, present, and future, can tell us. And they will.
Chelsea Green was born from a single seed: the beauty of craft. Craft in
writing and editing, in a story well told or a thesis superbly expressed. Craft
in design, illustration, and production. Craft in generating sales copy and
the word-of-mouth publicity that makes the story, the exposition inside
a books covers, leap forward, sometimes like wildfire, sometimes as slowly
and steadily as an unnoticed turtle, using all the tools now at our disposal,
most certainly including the Internets proliferating social media, as well as
through such old-fashioned activities as book tours and signings.
The notion of craft, of making books painstakingly, with an eye on their
aesthetic identity and purpose, as well as their secular or practical one, still
informs who we, some twenty employees at Chelsea Green, are and how
weall of us, in editorial and production, sales and marketing, distribution
and business operationslike to publish. Its in our DNA as professionals.
Up until now most of our hundreds of authors have appreciated this care.
People are moved by what they read. That pertains whether they read
an ebook or a printed one, and they want to connect with the writers who
make their lives richer. Part of the publishers role is to help make this
vitalizing connection.
This nexus among author, publisher, and reader is, I believe, unlikely to
wither anytime soon.
IAN BALDWIN, cofounder and publisher emeritus
September 2014 South Strafford, Vermont

P R E FAC E

hen people ask me what I do for work I tell them Im a book editor.
More often than not they then ask, Oh, does that mean you correct
spelling and grammar?
Well, yes, in a way . . . but then I go on to tell them about everything it
takes to get a book into print. Searching for and signing up the best authors
on topics that we want to publish. Nurturing and helping them develop
their ideas. Giving structure and organization to the text and artwork. Making hundreds of design and production decisions along the way. Describing
and positioning the book six months or more ahead of publication, so that
salespeople and marketers can promote and sell it in advance.
To me, publishing is a lot like time travel. We work on books that in some
cases may be years away from sitting on anyones shelf or night table. We
work on immediate deadlines, on books that are in editing or production
for the coming season. And these books dont disappear after publication:
We continue to sell them, often working with the author to promote them,
update them, and keep them current and in print. The most successful ones
have an impressively long life, one that spans decades.
It all makes for awkward conversation, though. When Im asked, What
are you reading? I often reply, Something youll be reading two years from
now. Its exciting to be ahead of the curve, a little out of sync with the world.

This book represents a moment frozen in timea snapshot of where Chelsea

Green Publishing has traveled, throughout the intellectual universe, over the
thirty years since its founding in 1984. Thirty years as a small independent
publisher may or may not seem like a long time, depending on ones perspective. The fact that we have survived through all of the seismic shifts in
publishing and bookselling that have occurred over the past three decades is,
to me at least, nothing sort of astonishing. And we are gratified and incredibly proud that we are thriving today as an employee-owned company,
continuing our mission to publish groundbreaking books on important subjects. The ideas and authors we publish are helping to build the foundation
for our collective futureone that I firmly believe will be better, wiser, and
more just and sustainable than our present age of transition and strife.
Each of the 106 books included in this anthology was originally published
by Chelsea Green. The excerpts were chosen to reflect the broad areas where

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we have published over the past thirty yearsfrom forays into literature
and memoir to progressive political thinking, to highly practical books on
building, agriculture, and other topics that embrace an underlying philosophy of sustainable living. Collectively, they define who we are as a publisher,
showing where we have been and suggesting where we are going.
In fact, I like to think of these brief excerpts as individual stones in a
cairn. A cairn is a landmark, a pile of rocks built by hikers high above tree
line in the mountains. It grows larger and larger over the years as new hikers
passing by contribute a new stone, or replace one that might have fallen. A
cairn is there to confirm, even on a foggy day, that we are on the right path,
and it indicates the way forward, to the summit.
Every book is a stone, or a brick in the wall, of an edifice that is always
being constructed, constantly evolving, and never quite finished. Perhaps its
no coincidence that a publishing company is colloquially referred to as a
house. At Chelsea Green we continue to build, with our authors and their
ideas, a great house, one that represents our deeply held values and beliefs,
our hopes and our dreams.
BEN WATSON, Senior Editor

CONTENTS
Foreword ix
Preface xv
ART, POETRY, FABLE & FICTION
The Man Who Planted Trees (1985)
In a Pigs Eye (1985)
Words and Images of Edvard Munch (1986)
Judevine (1991)
A Cafecito Story (2001)
Rehearsing with Gods (2004)
Not in His Image (2006)

1
3
5
7
11
13
15

NATURE & ADVENTURE TRAVEL

First Light (1986)
Backtracking (1987)
On Watching Birds (1988)
A Canoeists Sketchbook (1991)
Set Free in China (1992)
A Shadow and a Song (1992)
The Safari Companion (1993)
The Northern Forest (1995)
The Lost Language of Plants (2002)
Sippewissett (2006)
Javatrekker (2007)
Sex and the River Styx (2011)
In the Company of Bears (2013)

21
23
26
30
32
34
36
38
41
43
44
47
49

MEMOIR & BIOGRAPHY

Permanent Parisians (1986)
Goodbye Highland Yankee (1988)
John Burroughs (1992)
Loving and Leaving the Good Life (1992)
This Organic Life (2001)
A Handmade Life (2003)
An Unreasonable Woman (2005)
The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor (2007)

55
57
60
63
66
68
69
74

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Up Tunket Road (2010)

Diary of an Eco-Outlaw (2011)
Good Morning, Beautiful Business (2013)
Slowspoke (2013)

76
79
82
84

ORGANIC GARDENING &

SMALL-SCALE FARMING
The New Organic Grower (1989)
The Contrary Farmer (1994)
The Apple Grower (1998)
Sharing the Harvest (1999)
Natural Beekeeping (2007)
The Winter Harvest Handbook (2009)
The Resilient Gardener (2010)
The Small-Scale Poultry Flock (2011)
The Holistic Orchard (2011)
The Organic Grain Grower (2013)
An Unlikely Vineyard (2014)

89
91
93
95
96
99
101
103
104
106
110

FOOD & FOOD CULTURE

Whole Foods Companion (1996)
The Bread Builders (1999)
Wild Fermentation (2003)
Full Moon Feast (2006)
Cheesemonger (2010)
Chanterelle Dreams, Amanita Nightmares (2010)
Cheese and Culture (2012)
The Art of Fermentation (2012)
Taste, Memory (2012)
Rebuilding the Foodshed (2013)
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Food Rights (2013)

115
116
118
120
122
124
125
127
129
131
134

ENERGY & SHELTER

Wind Power (1993)
The Straw Bale House (1994)
Independent Builder (1996)
Who Owns the Sun? (1996)
The Natural House (2000)
The Hand-Sculpted House (2002)

139
140
141
143
146
147

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Contents

Passive Solar Architecture (2011)

Reinventing Fire (2011)
The Natural Building Companion (2012)
The New Net Zero (2014)

149
152
155
159

PERMACULTURE &
REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE
Gaias Garden (2000)
Edible Forest Gardens (2005)
The War on Bugs (2008)
Holy Shit (2010)
Sowing Seeds in the Desert (2012)
The Seed Underground (2012)
Paradise Lot (2013)
Growing Food in a Hotter, Drier Land (2013)
The Resilient Farm and Homestead (2013)
Organic Mushroom Farming and
Mycoremediation (2014)
Integrated Forest Gardening (2014)

165
166
169
172
173
177
179
181
184
187
189

SCIENCE & ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY

End of the Road (1991)
Limits to Growth (1992)
Gaviotas (1998)
Exposed (2007)
Notes from the Holocene (2007)
Thinking in Systems (2008)
Not One Drop (2008)
Waiting on a Train (2009)
Confronting Collapse (2009)
2052 (2012)
Cows Save the Planet (2013)
The Zero Waste Solution (2013)
Grass, Soil, Hope (2014)
Carbon Shock (2014)

195
196
199
203
206
210
212
215
217
220
223
226
229
231

POLITICS, ECONOMY & SOCIAL POLICY

The Vermont Papers (1989)
Walking on Water (2004)

235
236

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The Chelsea Green Reader

The ALL NEW Dont Think of an Elephant! (2004)

Unembedded (2005)
The End of America (2007)
Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money (2008)
The Looting of America (2009)
The End of Money and the
Future of Civilization (2009)
Howard Deans Prescription for Real
Healthcare Reform (2009)
Marijuana Is Safer (2009)
Bye Bye, Miss American Empire (2010)
Killing the Cranes (2011)
Get Up, Stand Up (2011)
Local Dollars, Local Sense (2012)
The New Feminist Agenda (2012)
What Then Must We Do? (2013)

238
242
244
246
249
251
255
258
260
262
267
270
273
275

EPILOGUE
Companies We Keep (2008)

281

Acknowledgments 285
List of Illustrations
287
Titles Published by Chelsea Green
289