Review by Choice Review
Extends the central theme of Nabhan's earlier works, Gathering the Desert (CH, Feb'86) and The Desert Smells Like Rain (CH, Jun'82), the theme of the interplay between biological and cultural diversity. In this work, Nabhan directs his attention to cultural traditions that maintain (and in turn depend on) reservoirs of genetic diversity found in natural communities and preserved as seeds. A poetic work of the the highest order, the book combines elements of narrative, biography, ethnobotany, and natural history, peopled with Native Americans and ethnobotanists from Nabhan's extensive research and travels. The proximate focus is on cultural traditions that develop, preserve, and use plant diversity, especially local crop ecotypes tuned to the soil, sun, rain, temperature, and biota characteristic of a particular place. However, the book is as much about the cultural significance of biological diversity as it is about the seeds themselves. In addressing the deep accomodation of traditional agricultural systems to the local ecology, Enduring Seeds reveals the profound influence of place on human societies. Nabhan thus describes an ancient and ongoing dialogue between culture and nature, with important lessons for modern agriculture. In so doing he sheds light on the interwoven themes of global diversity and survival in culture, agriculture, and nature. For all readers. -D. A. Falk, Arnold Arboretum/Harvard University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this collection of seven essays, Reid, a mountaineer for 25 yearsfor 25 years, or he's 25 years old? , aims high: it is the soul of the climber at timberline that holds his interest. Reid believes we can find our way ``home,'' back to our roots, by visiting mountains and wilderness. Blending facts and his emotions,, the author beautifully and passionately describes his experiences on the slopes and the residue from each. In the Tetons, he glimpsed the affinity between love and death. Atop the sacred Navaho peak Tsoodzi, he underwent spiritual reawakening. In the Catskills, mountain became educator. Retracing part of the 1833 trail of ol' Joe Walker's party in the Sierras, Reid discovered the joy of perseverance, which the group found on ``gazing at last on the great blue dream of the Pacific.'' A better guide than Reid would be hard to find. (May)per MS, but May on drop sheet/should have changed date on mss; sorry; may it is (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This unusual book presents the history of and the principles behind Native American farming methods. Those generally forgotten methods, still observable in scattered locations, especially in Latin America, are fading as the people and cultures that have maintained them through the centuries dwindle. With their demise we are losing the plants themselves: cultivated plants adapted to local conditions, together with their wild relatives (allowed to grow in and near the fields) with which they occasionally cross and gain genetic diversity. A detailed warning as to the consequences of losing this genetic stock can be found in Carolyn Jabs's The Heirloom Gardener ( LJ 7/84). Nabhan's readable account explains how and why we have arrived at this point.-- Annette Aiello, Smithsonian Tropical Research Inst., Panama (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A brave if ragged try at a daunting goal: to examine American Indian farming practices--above all, traditional approaches to genetic selection--in the context of ongoing crises in modern commercial-scale agriculture and land or water management throughout the Americas. Nabhan, a Phoenix-based ethnobotanist, uses the vehicle of a freewheeling travelogue through past and present Indian farm sites as a focus for a whole tangle of concerns: ""What were once considered separate issues--cultural survival, agricultural stability and diversity, and wildlife preservation--now seem to be tightly intertwined."" The crux of his thesis is that different relationships between man and domesticated food plants, with varied genetic and ecological consequences, are a function of a society's cultural values and that local mixed subsistence-farming communities tend to hang on to an active sense of interplay between cultivated plants and wild species. The assaults on this heritage that he documents are dismal though hardly surprising. The most obvious is physical destruction of Native American farmlands, along with seedstocks, by government land-allotment practices on reservations and a host of shortsighted water projects. Among the species affected by the deterioration or wholesale loss of habitats are wild rice and a rare gourd in the Everglades, decimated along with the tree on which it climbs by various rounds of swamp draining, flooding, and burning accompanied by rapid soil degradation. Nabhan is not the author to let his valuable and troubling material speak for itself without a lot of mawkish rhetorical poses (""I knew it was the time for braiding seedstocks together again"") and flaccid attempts at journalistic scene-setting. Yet the effort does substantially rise above a sometimes infelicitous execution, to bring across the lesson that strategies of food-plant manipulation for human purposes are at their best when they retain culturally rooted links with the genetic reserves of wild relatives and remain cognizant of wild habitats. Maybe there's a better book in this somewhere, but meanwhile Nabhan provides much useful chapter and verse about a subject not previously popularized in great detail by sustainable-agriculture enthusiasts. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
