From the book’s Prelude:

This book weaves together the study of annual and perennial plants, agriculture and its origins, and riddles of human consciousness. The intent that connects these seemingly different topics is my overall striving to discover and articulate ways of moving from learning about nature, to learning through or with nature. I’m concerned with the development of capacities to perceive, think, and act in ways that are in sync with the dynamics of the living world. 

We can learn a great deal from plants about the nature of life. In my research for this book, I took the notions of annual and perennial plants as lenses to consider how plants live and interact with the larger environment. It is relatively easy to study different plant species and to categorize them: this is an annual and that is a perennial. It is also fairly boring. The research became especially interesting when I started to see ways in which annuals have perennial characteristics and perennials have annual characteristics. “Annual” and “perennial” were then no longer categories (conceptual containers) that stood side by side. Increasingly they showed themselves as relational qualities of life itself. I was able to see the dynamics of plant life in new ways. In Chapter 2, I begin this exploration of annualness and perennialness in wild plants and expand it through the course of the book.

The focus on agriculture begins in Chapter 3 with an overview of annual and perennial food crops. . . . Many scholars have concerned themselves with the beginnings of agriculture and formulated a variety of theories and conjectures about what led people to shift from hunting and gathering food to growing and breeding crops. . . . From an ancient or indigenous perspective (broadly seen, and ignoring for the moment all the nuanced variations), reality consists of a weaving of beings and animate forces. The human being as one being among many is caught up in that weaving. Nature is not an impersonal “out there,” separate from a personal “in here.” I discuss how the development of modern science since the 17th century consummated a shift in the Western world from experiences of nature as animate and spirit-filled to the conviction that nature, at its foundation, consists of lifeless forces and matter. Impersonal cause-and-effect relations, not beings, rule the universe. Today life is thought to be built up out of mechanisms. The inanimate, not the animate, has become primary.

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

1. Prelude

On knowing that is alive

2. Wild Annuals and Perennials

Annual plants
Perennials
Taking root
Expanding ideas—Clonal plants
Plants in community

3. Annual and Perennial Food Crops

Domestication characteristics
Sustaining agriculture

4. On the Origins of Agriculture

Modern attempts to explain origins

5. Evolving Consciousness

Challenge for a science-based worldview
A world of interacting beings
Transition to modern intellectual consciousness

6. A Pathway to the Living

Beyond mechanism
Aliveness
Living perenniality

Acknowledgments

Notes  

References