Margot Anne Kelley Bücher

Ever wonder if there's a better way to live, work, and eat? You're not alone. This narrative explores five back-to-the-land movements in the U.S. from 1840 to today, highlighting how utopian-minded individuals sought small-scale farming as an alternative to mainstream agriculture. These movements reflect a quest for freedom, justice, healthier food, and a healthier planet. Throughout American industrial history, countercultural groups have opted for simpler lifestyles, driven by desires for unpolluted environments, equality, peace, authenticity, simplicity, healthy diets, and a connection to nature. The current back-to-the-land movement, led by millennials who left urban life for rural farming, emerged in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, exposing vulnerabilities in the industrial food supply chain. Historical figures like Thoreau and the Transcendentalists, early 20th-century self-sufficient communities, and the hippie back-to-the-landers of the 1970s laid the groundwork for today's movement. Food has evolved into a key element of social justice, encompassing not just what we consume but how it's produced and who benefits. The efforts of young farmers growing heirloom varieties and culturally relevant foods, along with advocacy and educational initiatives, are central to this era's Good Food Movement. This work invites readers to consider how we might lead better, more nourishing lives.

A gardener's pandemic journal that combines memoir with an exploration of the natural world both inside and outside the garden. In March 2020, Margot Anne Kelley was watching seeds germinate in her greenhouse. At high risk from illness, the planning, planting, and tending to seedlings took on extra significance. She set out to make her pandemic garden thrive but also to better understand the very nature of seeds and viruses. As seeds became seedlings, became plants, became food, Kelley looks back over the last few millennia as successions of pandemics altered human beings and global culture. Seeds and viruses serve as springboards for wide-ranging reflections, such as their shared need for someone to transport them, the centrality of movement to being alive, and the domestication of plants as an act of becoming co-dependent. Pandemic viruses only occurred through humankind's settling down, taking up agriculture, and giving up a nomadic life. And yet it's the garden that now provides a refuge and a source of life, inspiration, and hope. A Gardener at the End of the World explores questions of what we can preserve--of history, genetic biodiversity, culture, language--and what we cannot. It is for any reader curious about the overlap of nature, science, and history.