For most of human history, we have lived our daily lives in a close relationship with the land. Yet now, for the first time, more people are living in urban rather than rural areas, bringing about an estrangement. This book, by acclaimed author Jules Pretty, is fundamentally about our relationship with nature, animals and places.A series of interlinked essays leads readers on a voyage that weaves through the themes of connection and estrangement between humans and nature. The journey shows how our modern lifestyles and economies would need six or eight Earths if the entire worlds population adopted our profligate ways. Pretty shows that we are rendering our own world inhospitable and so risk losing what it means to be human: unless we make substantial changes, Gaia threatens to become Grendel. Ultimately, however, the book offers glimpses of an optimistic future for humanity, in the very face of climate change and pending global environmental catastrophe.

Preface: Green Places, Good Places * Part I: Green Places * Becoming Green * Birch Bark and Blue Sky * A Room with a Green View * Unhealthy Places * Part II: Animals and Us * Where the Wild Things Were * Hunters and the Hunted * Animal Magic * Part III: Food and the Land * The Fatta the Lan * Little Houses on the Prairie * The Shadow of the Rain * Rewilding Agriculture * Part IV: People and the Land * Legible Landscapes * Exclusion Zones * Life and Land on the North Atlantic Fringe * Part V: The Future * Ecolution * Liberation * Index