Love for the Land: Lessons from Farmers Who Persist in Place

Finalist for the Reed Environmental Writing Award, sponsored by the Southern Environmental Law Center Finalist for the 2024 Tennessee Book Award, sponsored by the Tennessee State Library and Archives (TSLA) and Humanities Tennessee (HT) “Brooks Lamb has taken seriously my father Wendell Berry’s assertion that we don’t have an agricultural crisis in America but a cultural crisis. He dares to take the virtues of affection and fidelity to particular places as economic necessities. Working landscapes and the farming people who belong to them have been ignored for generations; we have nearly lost the cultural knowledge that they hold. He tells their stories with due respect and calls upon us to learn from them.”—Mary Berry, executive director, The Berry Center “Love for the Land is excellent. It reinforces that the work we do daily has a spiritual presence. In this book, Brooks Lamb makes real the humanity of the land and our relationship to the land.”—Ebonie Alexander, executive director, Black Family Land Trust “Love for the Land puts readers directly in touch with farmers, highlighting their hopes and concerns as they navigate a complex agricultural and land management landscape. Given the absence of farmer voices in today’s increasingly urban world, this book is more necessary than ever.”—Norman Wirzba, author of This Sacred Life: Humanity’s Place in a Wounded World “In Love for the Land, Lamb powerfully explores the virtues of stewardship, tracing their import in and through quotidian rhythms of care, crises of consolidation, and the vital demands of environmental justice and racial equity. This is a graceful, thoughtful book.”—Grace Olmstead, author of Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We’ve Left Behind “Brooks Lamb uses the inspiring words of farmers who remain on their land to show how they exemplify the stewardship virtues of imagination, affection, and fidelity.”—Brian Donahue, author of Reclaiming the Commons: Community Farms and Forests in a New England Town