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Paperback – 384 pages
6 Inches × 9 Inches (w × h)

Weight: 515 Grams
BISAC: NATURE / Ecology
Publisher: New Society Publishers
ISBN: 9780865717268
Pub. Date: 2012-09-01

About the Author

Ellen LaConte

Ellen LaConte is Acting Director of the EarthWalk Alliance, a contributing editor to Green Horizon Magazine and The Ecozoic and former editor of Farmstead magazine. Author of On Light Alone and Free Radical, memoirs about Helen and Scott Nearing, influential homesteaders and bestselling authors of Living the Good Life, LaConte has been published in The Sun, East/West Journal, New Perspectives, Country Journal, Convergence and Gaia: A Literary & Environmental Journal, and in numerous websites and trade journals. After twenty three years homesteading in Mid-Coast Maine, she resides now in the Piedmont bioregion of North Carolina. www.ellenlaconte.com.

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Life Rules

Nature's Blueprint for Surviving Economic and Environmental Collapse

by Ellen LaConte



Corporate capitalism has ravaged the planet the way HIV ravages the human body, triggering a Critical Mass of cascading environmental, economic, social and political crises. Economic and climate instability, collapsing ecosystems, peak fossil fuels and devastating resource wars-if Earth were a patient, her condition would be critical. Life Rules offers a comprehensive analysis of our present circumstances combined with a holistic treatment protocol for restoring health to vulnerable human and natural communities.

Predicting that Life will last but, if we don't make some fundamental changes, life as we know it-and a lot of us-won't, Life Rules identifies natural laws that have allowed non-human communities to thrive and prosper for several billion years, including:

  • Local self-reliance
  • Mutual interdependence
  • Reliance on non-fossil sources of energy
  • Resource conservation, sharing and recycling
  • Co-operation and co-intelligence
  • Radically democratic self-organization and governance.

This sobering yet essentially optimistic manifesto is required reading for anyone concerned about our ability to live well and also within Earth's means. A powerful tool for community transition and cultural transformation, Life Rules offers a solution to our global challenges that is at once authentically hopeful, deeply inspiring and profoundly liberating.

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