short-form pamphlets
The Plantspeak Papers
The irony is not lost on the authors of this pamphlet that it is printed on the pulped remains of our kin. But as it is still a durable format for conveying information in your language, we have chosen it reluctantly.
faith in a seed, hope for the next generation
We need young people to feel hope, instead of the quiet desperation that pervades their daily experience. We need systems that go eyeball to eyeball with the challenges of this moment, responding with compassion and wisdom. We need to delight in this creation, to ask why, to dream, to create, and to envision a future replete with possibilities and hope.
Slowing Down Is A Radical Act
Deep understanding and insight are a result of being fully absorbed by what you are learning and opening yourself up to it. Spending an extended amount of time with one topic opens one to the possibility of being changed. Therefore, slowing down and being intentional about where you direct your attention is necessary for change in self and society.
The Middlebury College Student Almanac
Too often, attending college can be made to feel like a necessary four-year detour through a quaint small town on the way to a career. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We can turn a detour into a destination when we experience the joy and peace that comes with being together in this time and place.
Relationships Matter
For more than 40 years, I have had horses in my life. Mostly, my horses are pets and partners. But I have always wanted to share with other humans the wisdom and gifts the horses offer, day by day and year by year. Now, I use my herd to give workshops to groups, such as veterans and educators, about the profound experience of linking nurturing with nature.
Long-form Pamphlets
Go Farm, Young People,
and Help Heal the Country
A just and sustainable future will require rebuilding rural America. For too many decades, the countryside has been exploited and depopulated to support urban society, and enrich only suppliers and processors. For too many urban people with progressive politics, rural areas are dismissed as parochial, and resented for holding disproportionate power. And young people in rural communities have moved to cities in search of better opportunities. A better strategy, successfully pioneered a generation ago in Vermont, might be to encourage more young people to live in the country.
In this pamphlet, environmental historian and farmer Brian Donahue argues for empowering rural people so that they can replace the current extractive economy with an attractive economy, and for repopulating the countryside with intrepid young people to help drive change.
local food, more hope
In the revolutionary spirit of Thomas Paine, author, historian, and gardener Kathleen Smythe declares that the time has come for declaring independence from a global agricultural system that robs us of our food sovereignty and treats both consumers and farmers as mere colonial subjects; from the living Earth as inexhaustible rather than an exquisite complex of life that has slowly accumulated for millennia; and from human bodies as receptacles for whatever fossil fuel farming can produce most cheaply. Local food is our best hope in this declaration of independence from global food networks.