Sowing Seeds in the Desert by Masanobu Fukuoka
Fukuoka tells us greening the desert is the only way we’ll achieve sustainable agriculture.
Most of you are probably familiar with The One-Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming, which was Masanobu Fukuoka’s 1978 international best seller on natural farming.
Now he gives us Sowing Seeds in the Desert: Natural Farming, Global Restoration, and Ultimate Food Security. An intriguing and ambitious name, to be sure.
As the title implies, his premise is that we’ll need to ultimately cultivate food in the world’s vast deserts in order to achieve food security. This theory was honed over decades of international travel following his first book.
My favorite thing about this book? It proposes an actual solution, rather than simply discussing (or worse – complaining about) the problem. Whether it is truly the only long-term solution, I can’t say, but I’m glad to have a proposal. If we continue to approach the problem of unsustainable agriculture in this way we might actually get somewhere.
