Overview

The strategies offered in these three handbooks can equip a reader to thrive in present conditions as well as in a period of greater environmental and economic distress. The author contends that assets undervalued by the industrial era- spiritual strength, communal social skills, and practical knowledge-will become both the means to maintain quality of life amid disruptions, and also the bridge to a better society in the future. Each handbook addresses one of these topics in enough detail to lead readers to feel confident in expanding their own capacities. This book doesn't elaborate on specific details of the many interconnected problems we're currently facing as a society, but also doesn't shy away from the recognition that our current path is leading our civilization to collapse.

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Reviews

Alice Loyd gives us a path to individually and collectively take action in response to the many environmental and economic (also political and societal) challenges that are before us. Rather than doom and gloom it offers hope and motivation to build resilience through action, both introspective action (going within) and outward action, especially acquiring and applying useful knowledge for living more thoughtfully on the earth. This book is essential reading for everyone grappling with the realities of a changing climate and all its many implications. -Harvey Harman, Founder of Deep River Folk School and Living Well Ecovillage As we face the multiplying crises that characterize our lives in the mid- 21 st century, from climate breakdown and ecological devastation to the collapse in social and individual values that can sustain thriving societies in harmony with the wider natural world, where might we turn for spiritual and practical tools that can help us live into an uncertain future? Alice Loyd provides a wealth of guidance, starting with the question, ""How will we manage the contraction that has already begun?"" She focuses her attention on how those of us who live in the more affluent ""global North"" can adapt to a rapidly changing world in which our present consumption patterns and affluent ways of life and thinking are no longer compatible with a living Earth. Drawing on decades of her own inner search to know and live by what she names as the ""eternal verities,"" her experiences of living and working in conservation, local economies and more, together with a lifetime of wide reading and reflection, she provides three handbooks to help us. The first two handbooks provide nourishment for the spirit and the heart, as she explores the inner landscape of how to grow our strength to adapt to and live in hard times ahead - in alignment with ideals such as Truth, Beauty, and Fairness, Goodness - and then how to deepen our connection with each other and the wider natural world for the support and spiritual courage we will need. Despite the challenges of a world in which exploitation, venality, greed, and violence seem to dominate, these truths, she writes, are immutable, and a lodestar for us to follow individually and collectively. In the third handbook, she turns to basic practicalities, from growing sweet potatoes to making a homemade water purifier or a composting toilet, of how we can make preparations now not just to survive but hopefully thrive in simpler ways of life that harmonize meeting our essential needs with those of the wider natural world. We cannot predict what the next decades will bring or how much or little we can still prevent catastrophe, but one thing Alice Loyd makes clear in this eloquent call to inward and outward action: we will not survive the coming challenges unless, as she quotes poet William Stafford, ""You don't ever let go of the thread"" - the thread of timeless verities and values. It is good to be reminded of the moral imperatives of those deeper truths which, along with spades and seeds, will be among our most vital tools for living in right relationship with the whole Earth community, whatever the future holds. -Jennie M. Ratcliffe, Ph.D., author of Nothing Lowly in the Universe: An Integral Approach to the Ecological Crisis

Author Information

Alice Loyd has been writing about the climate crisis and energy policy since the early 2000s, advocating for low impact lifestyles. Grounded in her experiences as a child in the Great Depression and World War II, she writes to counter the culture's materialistic detachment from nature. After years/careers in education, business, and non-profit management, in retirement she founded the project Food Is the Key, where she has taught gardening and home food preservation.

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