Tom Brown’s Guide to Healing the Earth
by Tom Brown Jr.
and Randy Walker, Jr.
Berkley/Penguin Random House
11/26/2019
Nonfiction/Science
240 pages
Goodreads

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With the alarming situation of our planet, I always wonder what I can do to help at my little level. I thought Tom Brown’s Guide to Healing the Earth would provide me with answers. So I entered the giveaway, and I won!

The book is all about the author’s “grandfather’s vision”, a Southern Lipan Apache elder, and his amazing teaching methods. The co-author benefited also from this teaching at the Tracker School. He adds his own perspective at the end of most chapters, with a nice narrative of meditation and prayer in nature.

There’s a lot of inspiration in this book about healing the earth:

Each person who chooses to do so can become an effective agent of change in restoring balance in natural environments disrupted a distressed by modern society.
Each act of caretaking, no matter how small, makes a difference.
(p.xiii)

A large part is given to awareness of our surroundings, and of the issues at stake.

We must accept that it is no longer enough to be a caretaker or steward of our natural world; each of us individually must embrace the role of healer when it comes to saving what’s left of our Earth Mother.
p.23

Like the wolf who keeps deer populations from overgrazing vegetation, like the coyote who keeps rodents in check, humans have the ability to view an ecosystem as a whole and choose to move a system toward balance.
p.50

There are lots of beautiful and inspirational passages like these the book cover too, is gorgeous!
The last part of the books has also great stories. I especially loved the one by Tressea about animals bringing wounded ones to her door. It reminded me so much of the Lives of the Desert Fathers (Christian Egyptian monks in the 3rd century).

But I was actually expecting and hoping for more down to earth ideas of solutions, to see what I could do at my little level, besides what I am already doing.

How can we live our lives in ways that limit our uses and abuse of the energy footprint of just about everything we use and consume in our everyday lives?
p.108

Indeed, how? I don’t think going a few weeks to a tracker school would really help me, even though I would definitely try it if I were younger.

VERDICT: Good book to become more aware of the need to be a healer of the Earth. But concretely, not very helpful.

HAVE YOU READ THIS BOOK?
Any book with some good concrete ideas on how to?
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS  IN A COMMENT PLEASE

I won the book in a giveaway organized by the publisher