Originally published in 1991.
The need to produce food without the destructive chemical horrors of much modern farming, for an intelligent use of dwindling natural resources and for humane forms of production is universal, the practice is limited.
Asking the Earth is an account of one, large, instance of success in practice. Twenty-five years ago, Winin Pereira, a nuclear physicist abandoned academia to start a co-operative farm at Alonde in a tribal area north of Bombay. The group experienced, and finally discarded, all the false hopes and promises of Western originated forms of development: ploughs that ploughed too deep, irrigation systems that lowered water tables, fertilizers and pesticides which managed the earth and became so expensive that poorer farmers were dispossessed. Instead they learnt from the adivasai, or tribal people, who have nurtured or been nurtured by forests for millennia, ways of applying popular knowledge to contemporary problems. Asking the Earth is a combination of Pereira's record of achievement of sustainable livelihoods and an account of the farm and its effect on the India around it by a leading British journalist.
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction
- The Other Side of History
- The Sustainable Lifestyle of the Warlis
- Red Ink in the 'Blueprint for Survival'
- Technological Intervention
- Farming Systems
- Interconnections of Violence
- Sa Vidya Ya Virniktaye!
- The Bhagat and the Allopath
- Natural Versus Formal Forestry
- Celebrating Trees, Celebrating Life
- Restoring our Future
Glossary of Plant Names
Index