No Place Like Home: Notes from a Western Life

Additional Resources

Additional Resources This list of reading material and other resources includes books and organizations that have contributed to my thoughts on community. I hope to encourage you to explore some of the thousands of ways people are creating community. Find a way that satisfies you. Community, according to most dictionaries, suggests joint or common ownership of resources. The Great Plains savanna belongs to the nation and conceals unknown resources that might help us feed ourselves, cure diseases, power necessary machines. The unique ecosystem of the shortgrass prairie is too valuable to be wasted by shortsighted greed. Reading and talking about community can provide us with different viewpoints , but the only way to learn how to live in a community is to get out and live in it. Contribute; give that you shall receive the kind of community you visualize. Berry, Wendell. Another Turn of the Crank. Washington dc: Counterpoint Press, 1996. Wendell Berry writes about the importance of local economies, the value of locally produced foods, and the way real communities function. Reading any of his books will give you new insights about your own life and relationship to community. Butala, Sharon. The Perfection of the Morning, HarperSanFrancisco, 1995; Coyote’s Morning Cry, Toronto: HarperCollins, 1995; Wild Stone Heart, Toronto: HarperFlamingo, 2000. Like me, Sharon has spent several decades exploring a specific patch of prairie, becoming intimately acquainted with its past and the community in which it lies. Her insights are always thoughtful and emerge from deep and intimate knowledge of her place. Dagget, Dan. Beyond the Rangeland Conflict. 1995. 2nd ed. Good Stewards Project, 2000. Dist. by University of Nevada Press. Dagget is one of the first environmentalists to dive into the world of ranching and find practical solutions to pressing land-use problems. Gruchow, Paul. Grass Roots: The Universe of Home. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1995. I found much in Paul’s reflections on growing up on a farm, in the center of a traditional farming community that mirrored my own ranch upbringing . Paul’s thoughtful responses show he understood what is necessary to keep such communities alive. Kemmis, Daniel. Community and the Politics of Place. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990. I heard Daniel Kemmis speak on community in the 1990s and have read and reread this book. It’s easy to theorize about community, but Kemmis has done what most theorists have not: worked to build community by participating in politics. 208 Nn Additional Resources Knight, Richard L., Wendell C. Gilgert, and Ed Marston, eds. Ranching West of the 100th Meridian: Culture, Ecology, and Economics. Washington dc: Island Press, 2002. Scientific analysis alternates with poetry and prose in this collection of honest, blunt testimonials from folks involved in modern ranching. Krueger, Frederick W., ed. Christian Ecology: Building an Environmental Ethic for the Twenty-First Century. San Francisco: The Conference, 1988. I may have gotten this collection at a conference on stewardship at Assumption Abbey, home of the monks of the Order of St. Benedict in Richardson, North Dakota. Kathleen Norris persuaded Dan O’Brien and me to discuss with Lutheran ministers how Christians might be better stewards of God’s earth. The conference was life-changing in many ways. I’ve been unable to find elsewhere Wendell Berry ’s comments in “God and Country” on the concept of “usufruct”: the idea that stewardship is the responsible care of property belonging to another. Thus, says Berry, God charges us to take good care of the earth because it is His property, and we jeopardize not only our earthly lives but our souls when we do not. Meloy, Ellen. The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky. New York: Vintage, 2003. I’d read several of Ellen’s books and exchanged letters with her before her sudden death in 2004. By that time, I’d been writing about community for nearly fourteen years. Her death seemed too much; I lost heart for the work of trying to explain why we must not destroy the natural western landscape. Then, in 2006, I discovered this book, and, though I had never heard her living voice, was struck again by how many of her ideas coincided with my own. Her words cheered me on. Putnam. Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000. Putnam discusses the old dichotomy , community versus individual: “Our national myths often exaggerate the role of individual heroes and understate the importance of collective effort,” he says...