Consulting the Genius of the Place

Consulting the Genius of the Place PDF Author: Wes Jackson
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 158243848X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
Locavore leaders such as Alice Waters, Michael Pollan, and Barbara Kingsolver all speak of the need for sweeping changes in how we get our food. A longtime leader of this movement is Wes Jackson, who for decades has taken it upon himself to speak for the land, to speak for the soil itself. Here, he offers a manifesto toward a conceptual revolution: Jackson asks us to look to natural ecosystems—or, if one prefers, nature in general—as the measure against which we judge all of our agricultural practices. Jackson believes the time is right to do away with annual monoculture grains, which are vulnerable to national security threats and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs. Soil erosion and the poisons polluting our water and air—all associated with agriculture from its beginnings—foretell a population with its natural fertility greatly destroyed. In this eloquent and timely volume, Jackson argues we must look to nature itself to lead us out of the mess we've made. The natural ecosystems will tell us, if we listen, what should happen to the future of food.

Consulting the Genius of the Place

Consulting the Genius of the Place PDF Author: Wes Jackson
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 158243848X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 202

Get Book Here

Book Description
Locavore leaders such as Alice Waters, Michael Pollan, and Barbara Kingsolver all speak of the need for sweeping changes in how we get our food. A longtime leader of this movement is Wes Jackson, who for decades has taken it upon himself to speak for the land, to speak for the soil itself. Here, he offers a manifesto toward a conceptual revolution: Jackson asks us to look to natural ecosystems—or, if one prefers, nature in general—as the measure against which we judge all of our agricultural practices. Jackson believes the time is right to do away with annual monoculture grains, which are vulnerable to national security threats and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs. Soil erosion and the poisons polluting our water and air—all associated with agriculture from its beginnings—foretell a population with its natural fertility greatly destroyed. In this eloquent and timely volume, Jackson argues we must look to nature itself to lead us out of the mess we've made. The natural ecosystems will tell us, if we listen, what should happen to the future of food.

Becoming Native to This Place

Becoming Native to This Place PDF Author: Wes Jackson
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1619026880
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 72

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Book Description
In six compelling essays, Wes Jackson lays the foundation for a new farming economy grounded in nature's principles and located in dying small towns and rural communities. Exploding the tenets of industrial agriculture, Jackson seeks to integrate food production with nature in a way that sustains both. His writing is anchored in his work with The Land Institute, lending authenticity to topics that—in the hands of other writers—too often fail to escape the realm of the conceptual.

Nature as Measure

Nature as Measure PDF Author: Wes Jackson
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1582438935
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
An essential and timely collection of wise and compelling essays from one of the longtime leaders of the sustainable agriculture movement in America. Wes Jackson, “a well–known and admired advocate for sustainability especially as it relates to agriculture, has the rare ability to transform his convictions into captivating prose . . . Jackson’s thoughts are still as significant and profound as they were nearly 20 years ago” (Publishers Weekly) and can teach us many things about the land, soil, and conservation, but what most resonates is this: The ecosphere is self–regulating, and as often as we attempt to understand it, we are not its builders, and our manuals will often be faulty. The only responsible way to learn the nuances of the land is to study the soil and vegetation in their natural state and pass this knowledge on to future generations. “[A] small book rich in ideas” (The New York Times Book Review), Nature as Measure collects Jackson’s essays from Altars of Unhewn Stone and Becoming Native to This Place, presenting ideas of land conservation and education that are written from the point of view of a man who has practiced what he’s preached and proven that it is possible to partially restore much of the land that we’ve ravaged. Wes Jackson lays the foundation for a new farming economy, grounded in nature’s principles and located in dying small towns and rural communities. Exploding the tenets of industrial agriculture, Jackson seeks to integrate food production with nature in a way that sustains both. His longtime friend Wendell Berry provides an informative, contextual Introduction. “For those concerned about what will be left and how many billion will be starving in twenty years, this is a must read.” —Register of the Kentucky Historical Society “A good introduction to a thinker whose ideas on agriculture are radical both in their technical approach to food production as well as in terms of the economic, social, and cultural context within which it is practiced.” —Review of Radical Political Economics

Sparks of Genius

Sparks of Genius PDF Author: Robert Root-Bernstein
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 0547525893
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
Discover the cognitive tools that lead to creative thinking and problem-solving with this “well-written and easy-to-follow” guide (Library Journal). Explore the “thinking tools” of extraordinary people, from Albert Einstein and Jane Goodall to Mozart and Virginia Woolf, and learn how you can practice the same imaginative skills to become your creative best. With engaging narratives and examples, Robert and Michèle Root-Bernstein investigate cognitive tools such as observing, recognizing patterns, modeling, playing, and more. Sparks of Genius is “a clever, detailed and demanding fitness program for the creative mind” and a groundbreaking guidebook for anyone interested in imaginative thinking, lifelong learning, and transdisciplinary education (Kirkus Reviews). “How different the painter at the easel and the physicist in the laboratory! Yet the Root-Bernsteins recognize the deep-down similarity of all creative thinking, whether in art or science. They demonstrate this similarity by comparing the accounts that various pioneers and inventors have left of their own creative processes: for Picasso just as for Einstein, for Klee just as for Feynman, the creative impulse always begins in vision, in emotion, in intuition. . . . With a lavishly illustrated chapter devoted to each tool, readers quickly realize just how far the imagination can stretch.” —Booklist “A powerful book . . . Sparks of Genius presents radically different ways of approaching problems.” —American Scientist

The Advantage

The Advantage PDF Author: Patrick M. Lencioni
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118266102
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
There is a competitive advantage out there, arguably more powerful than any other. Is it superior strategy? Faster innovation? Smarter employees? No, New York Times best-selling author, Patrick Lencioni, argues that the seminal difference between successful companies and mediocre ones has little to do with what they know and how smart they are and more to do with how healthy they are. In this book, Lencioni brings together his vast experience and many of the themes cultivated in his other best-selling books and delivers a first: a cohesive and comprehensive exploration of the unique advantage organizational health provides. Simply put, an organization is healthy when it is whole, consistent and complete, when its management, operations and culture are unified. Healthy organizations outperform their counterparts, are free of politics and confusion and provide an environment where star performers never want to leave. Lencioni’s first non-fiction book provides leaders with a groundbreaking, approachable model for achieving organizational health—complete with stories, tips and anecdotes from his experiences consulting to some of the nation’s leading organizations. In this age of informational ubiquity and nano-second change, it is no longer enough to build a competitive advantage based on intelligence alone. The Advantage provides a foundational construct for conducting business in a new way—one that maximizes human potential and aligns the organization around a common set of principles.

Lords of Strategy

Lords of Strategy PDF Author: Walter Kiechel
Publisher: Harvard Business Press
ISBN: 1422157318
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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Book Description
Imagine, if you can, the world of business - without corporate strategy. Remarkably, fifty years ago that's the way it was. Businesses made plans, certainly, but without understanding the underlying dynamics of competition, costs, and customers. It was like trying to design a large-scale engineering project without knowing the laws of physics. But in the 1960s, four mavericks and their posses instigated a profound shift in thinking that turbocharged business as never before, with implications far beyond what even they imagined. In The Lords of Strategy, renowned business journalist and editor Walter Kiechel tells, for the first time, the story of the four men who invented corporate strategy as we know it and set in motion the modern, multibillion-dollar consulting industry: Bruce Henderson, founder of Boston Consulting Group Bill Bain, creator of Bain & Company Fred Gluck, longtime Managing Director of McKinsey & Company Michael Porter, Harvard Business School professor Providing a window into how to think about strategy today, Kiechel tells their story with novelistic flair. At times inspiring, at times nearly terrifying, this book is a revealing account of how these iconoclasts and the organizations they led revolutionized the way we think about business, changed the very soul of the corporation, and transformed the way we work.

Hogs Are Up

Hogs Are Up PDF Author: Wes Jackson
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700630597
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Hogs Are Up: Stories of the Land, with Digressions reveals what makes Wes Jackson tick. What kind of lessons does he draw from his unique life experiences, and how do they shape his profoundly revolutionary worldview? Sometimes funny, sometimes wistful, always insightful, this volume demonstrates that when telling a good story, digressions can be the main point. Born during the Great Depression, Jackson tells stories of his youth on a diversified farm in the Kansas River Valley near Topeka, Kansas, culminating in more than forty years of leadership to radically transform agriculture, literally at its very roots. Wes Jackson draws deeply from the lessons learned from his experience dating from World War II to his work at The Land Institute to establish a new Natural Systems Agriculture. But this book is more than that. It includes an eclectic mix of thinkers and doers he’s met along the way. Wes Jackson is heavily influenced by the cultural legacy of grandparents, all four of whom were born before the Civil War began, and from his parents, who were born before 1900. He was born into a culture of crop diversity where animals and people were out in the fields and around. He saw the tractor arrive and the horses leave. After you read Hogs Are Up: Stories of the Land, with Digressions you may share his misgivings about what conventional thinkers see as “progress.” Jackson is constantly exploring the world around him and will engage anyone who can help him think about a discovery, an experiment, or recent insight. Jackson believes that our insights must go beyond the latest scholarly study and government report if we are to get the necessary interest for people to change. The stories and digressions he shares in Hogs Are Up are the fruit of a longtime effort to lay the agricultural and cultural foundation for a new worldview grounded in nature’s principles and located in rural communities able to survive through a new relationship of humanity to the ecosphere.

Integrated Forest Gardening

Integrated Forest Gardening PDF Author: Wayne Weiseman
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
ISBN: 1603584978
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Permaculture is a movement that is coming into its own, and the concept of creating plant guilds in permaculture is at the forefront of every farmer's and gardener's practice. One of the essential practices of permaculture is to develop perennial agricultural systems that thrive over several decades without expensive and harmful inputs: perennial plant guilds, food forests, agroforestry, and mixed animal and woody species polycultures. The massive degradation of conventional agriculture and the environmental havoc it creates has never been as all pervasive in terms of scale, so it has become a global necessity to further the understanding of a comprehensive design and planning system such as permaculture that works with nature, not against it. The guild concept often used is one of a "functional relationship" between plants-beneficial groupings of plants that share functions in order to bring health and stability to a plant regime and create an abundant yield for our utilization. In other words, it is the integration of species that creates a balanced, healthy, and thriving ecosystem. But it goes beyond integration. A guild is a metaphor for all walks of life, most importantly a group of people working together to craft works of balance, beauty, and utility. This book is the first, and most comprehensive, guide about plant guilds ever written, and covers in detail both what guilds are and how to design and construct them, complete with extensive color photography and design illustrations. Included is information on: - What we can observe about natural plant guilds in the wild and the importance of observation; - Detailed research on the structure of plant guilds, and a portrait of an oak tree (a guild unto itself); - Animal interactions with plant guilds; - Steps to guild design, construction, and dynamics: from assessment to design to implementation; - Fifteen detailed plant guilds, five each from the three authors based on their unique perspectives; - Guild project management: budgets, implementation, management, and maintenance. Readers of any scale will benefit from this book, from permaculture designers and professional growers, to backyard growers new to the concept of permaculture. Books on permaculture cover this topic, but never in enough depth to be replicable in a serious way. Finally, it's here!

Consulting Drucker

Consulting Drucker PDF Author: William A. Cohen
Publisher: Lid Publishing
ISBN: 9781911498674
Category : Management
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Peter Drucker is known worldwide as ' The Father of Modern Management' . But he was also the world's most famous and successful independent consultant. The methods developed by Drucker remain highly relevant and continue to be used in organizations today. This book, written by the first executive PhD graduate of the program Drucker developed, is the first book to reveal in detail Drucker's methods and ideas as a consultant. Jack Welch noted that his success at GE was based on Drucker's consulting advice. Bill Bartmann, who became the 25th wealthiest man in America at one point, also credits Drucker's advice in helping with his success. This book is an encyclopaedia of Drucker's consulting approaches and how and when to apply them. It will enable executives and managers to gain new insight into Drucker's thinking and methods, and why they continue to have such tremendous influence over today's organizations.

The Genius of Jesus

The Genius of Jesus PDF Author: Erwin Raphael McManus
Publisher: Convergent Books
ISBN: 0593137388
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
A groundbreaking manifesto decoding the phenomenon of genius through the life of Jesus of Nazareth, revealing the untapped potential within every human being—from the bestselling author of The Artisan Soul, The Last Arrow, and The Way of the Warrior. “IF ALL GENIUS IS TOUCHED BY MADNESS, THEN IT IS ALSO TOUCHED BY THE DIVINE.” In every realm of our existence—art, science, technology, mathematics—we are captivated by stories of genius. Geniuses violate the status quo, destabilize conventional ways of thinking, and ultimately disrupt history by making us see the world differently. Genius is that rare expression of human capacity that seems to touch the divine. Jesus of Nazareth is undeniably one of the most influential figures ever to have walked the face of the earth. Yet his life as a work of genius has yet to be excavated and explored. In The Genius of Jesus, Erwin Raphael McManus examines the person of Jesus not simply through the lens of his divinity, but as a man who radically changed the possibility of what it means to be human. Drawing on the phenomenon of genius and the phenomenon of Jesus, McManus leads us to see this momentous figure in a new and life-altering way. Genius always leaves clues, and The Genius of Jesus follows those clues so that you can discover your own personal genius. McManus dives into the nuances of Jesus’s words and actions, showing how they can not only inspire us but revolutionize how we think about power, empathy, meaning, beauty, and truth. This work is for anyone who seeks to transform their life from the mundane to the transcendent—for anyone who longs to awaken the genius within. The Genius of Jesus is a thought-provoking exploration of the most controversial and influential figure who ever lived, and a guide for you to discover how his genius can live in you.