The end of the globalization experiment has arrived.

“This timely book . . . prepares us to leave the city and embrace the self-reliant life of farming, provides the spiritual foundation for a rural future — yet is grounded in practical reality — and shows us how to finally create a restorative ecological civilization.”

  • Chapter One: Listening to Nature: Our Heritage

    Chapter Two: Nature as the Ground of Human Consciousness

    Chapter Three: The Thirteenth, The Greatest of Centuries

  • Chapter 4: Globalization: A Threat to Our Way of Life

    Chapter 5: The Role of the Scientific Revolution

    Chapter 6: The Rise and roles of Industry, Cities and Centralized Power

  • Chapter Seven: The Perennial Philosophy: A Tradition to Protect Nature and Society

    Chapter Eight: Gardens of Antiquity: Symbols of the Sacred Natural Order

  • Chapter Nine: Small is Beautiful: Preparing to Live in a Decentralized Rural Economy

    Chapter Ten: Moving to the Land: Living Once More with Nature

  • Chapter Eleven: Nature as the Source of Values and Ethics: Is Just Behavior Embedded in Nature?

    Chapter Twelve: The Land as Our Home: Towards an Ecological Civilization

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The Impact of Globalization

Today, 81% of the global population lives in urban areas. — 45% reside in cities, and 36% in towns.

Only 5% of the global population lived in cities throughout human history.

Only 15% of global land is environmentally protected.

The defining structural shift of modern agriculture occurred in the decades following World War II, engineered by government agricultural policies and subsidies. Originally designed during the Great Depression to protect low-income farmers from market volatility, post-war subsidies were repurposed to maximize raw volume and drive down food production costs.

Small family farms could not afford the expensive equipment or high-volume chemical inputs required to compete. Because the subsidized market flooded the globe with cheap grain, crop prices plummeted. Small farms, operating without economies of scale, became financially unviable.

As a direct result of these targeted post-war subsidies, millions of self-sufficient family farms collapsed, and their land was absorbed by large agribusinesses. Biodiverse rural landscapes were replaced by vast, industrial monocultures. This system provides cheap, abundant food, but it leaves behind a legacy of depleted soil, diminished biodiversity, and heavily consolidatedcorporate control over the global food supply. The global food trade causes massive CO2 emissions.

This is a book about the gift of life. Not just the overall gift, but the extraordinary capacities within that gift, and what we can give back.

About 25 years ago, I was given the experience of Satori.

I have not reciprocated that gift until now, when the planet is staggering under the burden of humanity’s isolation from its origins in Nature.

~ Elizabeth Woodworth

For millennia, human beings have sought to understand the meaning and purpose of the Great Mystery of life. And a mystery it remains, as so many of us – while deeply grateful for the unfathomable gift of our lives – yearn to grasp its source and purpose.

Why would the Creator of such infinite complexity and order in the cosmos have brought into being the miracle of life and consciousness?

Why does beauty even exist?

Whether the life of a butterfly, a robin, a dolphin, or a human being: Can there be a better explanation than the timeless words of the great German mystic, Meister Eckhart?

“In this life we are to become heaven so that God might find a home here.” Meister Eckhart, c. 1260-1328

If God fashioned us in order to share our consciousness of the world He made, then we have a sacred purpose and responsibility to rest our eyes and hearts upon Earth’s beauty so that our Creator might share it through our senses.

This means carrying God in our hearts at all times, mindful of the purpose of God in placing us in Nature, our home and His.

It means coming home to Nature. The purpose of each chapter in this book is to free us from lesser ideas that are holding us back – as we look at Nature through a long-lost lens.

The Peace of Wild Things, read by author, poet, activist and farmer Wendell Berry

  • "Woodworth’s latest book serves as a guide to a renewed Nature-based civilization. She has written a book that Thomas Berry would have called ‘a great work. ’"

    ~ Dr. Peter Carter; Climate Emergency Institute (Canada)

  • "Something is very wrong. Our children are depressed and suicidal. Might we still experience a sense of connection that is grounded in an immersive versus exploitive view of the natural world?

    ~ David Bowering, MD, former Medical Health Officer, British Columbia

  • “Canadian researcher, Elizabeth Woodworth, has assembled a tour de force of coming home to nature, our Mother. In this frenetic world, the medicine for community, health, spirituality and mental wellbeing is reconnecting with the natural world. It starts with recognizing the importance of all animals to the stability of ecosystems and moves onto caregiving the soil and growing our own food.”

    ~ Dr. Reese Halter, Distinguished Earth System scientist, broadcaster, award-winning conservationist, Los Angeles