The Reading List
Curated books for going deeper into ancestral knowledge. Find them at your local independent bookshop or library.
Building with Earth: Design and Technology of a Sustainable Architecture
Gernot Minke
The definitive technical reference for earthen construction — adobe, rammed earth, cob, and compressed earth blocks. Richly illustrated with global examples and structural details.
Find on Bookshop.org →Earthen Floors: A Modern Approach to an Ancient Practice
Sukita Reay Crimmel and James Thomson
The definitive practical reference for installing earthen floors — clay, sand, straw, and linseed-oil cured — in residential and commercial buildings. The book covers material selection, mix design, installation, and finishing. Permits in several US states (Oregon, New Mexico, parts of California) now accommodate earthen floors with documented technical specifications.
Find on Bookshop.org →Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action
Elinor Ostrom
Elinor Ostrom's Nobel-winning empirical study of common-pool resource institutions — Swiss alpage, Valencian huerta, Japanese iriai, Philippine zanjera — and the eight design principles that distinguish those that last from those that collapse.
Find on Bookshop.org →Portfolios of the Poor: How the World's Poor Live on $2 a Day
Collins, Morduch, Rutherford & Ruthven
A rigorous year-long study of household financial diaries in Bangladesh, India, and South Africa — revealing the sophisticated informal financial instruments (ROSCAs, moneylenders, savings clubs) the poor rely on to manage cash flow.
Find on Bookshop.org →Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition
Charles Eisenstein
An accessible, philosophical analysis of how interest-bearing debt money structures modern economic relationships and what gift economies, demurrage currencies, and ROSCA-like arrangements offer as alternatives. Eisenstein draws on Lewis Hyde, Bernard Lietaer, and Karl Polanyi but writes in plain language. Pairs naturally with the savings-circle entries on this site.
Find on Bookshop.org →Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation
Michael Pollan
Pollan's four-part exploration of the elemental cooking techniques — fire, water, air, earth — corresponding to grilling, braising, baking, and fermentation. Useful pairing with Sandor Katz on the fermentation chapter, with the addition of strong reporting on the cultural and family contexts that gave each technique its form. Accessible entry point for readers approaching traditional food practice for the first time.
Find on Bookshop.org →Decolonize Your Diet: Plant-Based Mexican-American Recipes for Health and Healing
Luz Calvo and Catriona Rueda Esquibel
Calvo and Rueda Esquibel reconstruct the pre-Columbian Mesoamerican plant-centred diet — maize-bean-squash polyculture, amaranth, quelites, chocolate, agave — as a contemporary health practice for Chicana/o and Mexican-American communities. Combines food history with practical recipes. The cultural-attribution work is careful and the recipes are practical.
Find on Bookshop.org →The Art of Fermentation
Sandor Ellix Katz
The comprehensive guide to fermentation as preservation and nutrition — covering traditions from every continent including African injera, Asian miso and natto, and European sauerkraut. Winner of the James Beard Award.
Find on Bookshop.org →The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South
Michael W. Twitty
Michael Twitty traces African American foodways from West African rice culture through the Carolina Lowcountry, weaving genealogy, history, and recipes. A James Beard Award winner that reclaims the kitchen heritage that built Southern American cooking.
Find on Bookshop.org →The New Organic Grower
Eliot Coleman
Eliot Coleman's working manual from his Four Season Farm in Maine: soil management, crop rotation, season extension, and small-scale market farming. The reference text for biointensive vegetable production at the half-acre to five-acre scale.
Find on Bookshop.org →The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It
John Seymour
John Seymour's illustrated compendium of homestead skills — from raising and butchering livestock to cheese-making, brewing, and woodland management. The single most practical book on running a smallholding written in the second half of the 20th century.
Find on Bookshop.org →Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods
Sandor Ellix Katz
Katz's first and most accessible book on fermentation — sourdough, sauerkraut, kimchi, kvass, mead. Less technical than *The Art of Fermentation*, more focused on practical home techniques. The introduction to lacto-fermentation for the household kitchen, drawing on traditions from every continent.
Find on Bookshop.org →The Lost Language of Plants
Stephen Harrod Buhner
A profound examination of the intelligence of plants and the ethnobotanical knowledge humans developed over millennia — and are now rapidly losing. Buhner grounds his argument in biochemistry while honoring Indigenous cosmologies.
Find on Bookshop.org →Braiding Sweetgrass
Robin Wall Kimmerer
A botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation weaves Indigenous plant knowledge with Western science to illuminate reciprocal relationships between humans and the plant world. One of the most important environmental books of the last decade.
Find on Bookshop.org →Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm's Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land
Leah Penniman
Leah Penniman's farm-tested guide to regenerative agriculture rooted in African and Afro-diasporic land traditions. Practical chapters on soil rebuilding, seed keeping, animal husbandry, and farm business — alongside the history of Black agrarian wisdom from Fannie Lou Hamer to George Washington Carver.
Find on Bookshop.org →Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 1
Brad Lancaster
Lancaster's hand-illustrated manual on the eight principles of rainwater earthworks, with field-tested designs from his Tucson neighborhood. The single best practitioner reference for harvesting rain in arid and semi-arid sites.
Find on Bookshop.org →Restoration Agriculture: Real-World Permaculture for Farmers
Mark Shepard
Wisconsin farmer Mark Shepard's hard-numbers analysis of perennial polyculture as an alternative to annual row-crop agriculture. Documents his New Forest Farm operation — chestnuts, hazelnuts, apples, currants, integrated livestock — and the productivity data versus conventional Midwest agriculture. Practical, technical, and grounded in long observation. Useful for anyone considering agroforestry on temperate-zone land.
Find on Bookshop.org →The One-Straw Revolution
Masanobu Fukuoka
The Japanese agronomist's 1975 manifesto on 'do-nothing' natural farming — no-till, no-fertilizer, no-pesticide rice and barley cultivation that out-yielded conventional Japanese agriculture in Fukuoka's Ehime prefecture trials. Influenced the global permaculture and natural-farming movements. Still in print fifty years on for good reason.
Find on Bookshop.org →The Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia
Piers Vitebsky
Cambridge anthropologist Vitebsky's twenty-year ethnographic study of the Eveny reindeer-herding people of northeastern Siberia. The book documents an indigenous knowledge system about pastoral relationship, ecological adaptation, and spirit-animal practice that survived Soviet collectivisation and continues to adapt to post-Soviet conditions. Among the best contemporary works on northern-Eurasian indigenous knowledge.
Find on Bookshop.org →The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture
Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry's 1977 critique of industrial agriculture and the small-farm tradition it replaced — still the central American text on what is lost when food production is severed from place, household, and community.
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