Other Sellers on Amazon
+ $3.99 shipping
83% positive over last 12 months
Usually ships within 4 to 5 days.
+ $3.99 shipping
73% positive over last 12 months
Usually ships within 3 to 4 days.
+ $3.99 shipping
100% positive over last 12 months
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Learn more
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle Cloud Reader.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
The Ecology of Care: Medicine, Agriculture, Money, and the Quiet Power of Human and Microbial Communities Paperback – December 10, 2015
| Didi Pershouse (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
| Price | New from | Used from |
Enhance your purchase
In this richly layered book, Didi Pershouse takes us on a fast-moving, sharp-witted journey through her own life: from growing up with the neurosurgeon who accidentally discovered the seat of memory in the brain, to working in a smoke-filled office at New York magazine, to her career as an innovative acupuncturist in Vermont, and on to a passion for close-knit communities, grazing cows, and soil restoration as solutions to much of what ails us. Along the way, she unfolds a surprising new take on the story of our time: how the germ theory of disease joined with a profit-based economy, and unwittingly led to a “sterilization” of medicine, agriculture, and even our social lives. This 150-year detour has brought about the near destruction of our climate as well as a great forgetting of the power of connection. By documenting a scientific understanding of the intelligence of the whole, Pershouse nudges us awake with a hopeful view and shows us how to reclaim the rich, “fertile” lives we are meant for.
- Print length316 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateDecember 10, 2015
- Dimensions6 x 0.79 x 9 inches
- ISBN-10069261303X
- ISBN-13978-0692613030
Frequently bought together

- +
- +
Customers who bought this item also bought
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR Peter Donovan is the founder of the Soil Carbon Coalition. He has herded sheep, played piano for ballet classes, and worked on cattle ranches, but he now spends most of his time touring North America in his school-bus home, facilitating workshops, and measuring changes in soil carbon and water cycles. The drawings in this book are from his travels. He has reported widely on innovative land managers; most of his articles can be found at managingwholes.com.
Product details
- Publisher : Mycelium Books; 1st edition (December 10, 2015)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 316 pages
- ISBN-10 : 069261303X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0692613030
- Item Weight : 1.03 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 0.79 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #257,514 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #95 in Health Policy (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Didi Pershouse is the founder of the Land and Leadership Initiative, and the Center for Sustainable Medicine. She developed a practice and theoretical framework for systems-based ecological medicine—to restore health to people as well as the environmental and social systems around them. After 22 years of clinical work with patients, Pershouse now travels internationally as a speaker, educator, and consultant. She was one of five speakers at the United Nations-FAO World Soil Day in 2017.
You can learn more about her work at: www.didipershouse.com.
Sign up for online and in-person courses and workshops at: www.landandleadership.org.
Join her Patreon Community and support her work at https://www.patreon.com/didipershouse.
Pershouse is a skilled facilitator, who brings conservative and liberal organizations together into effective working groups with common goals: improving soil health, public health, food and water security, and regional resilience through simple changes in land management. Both online and in-person, her participatory workshops engage the public, farmers and ranchers, policy makers, investors, and scientists in living-systems thinking and mutual resourcing, to help them find effective interventions.
In 2018, she founded the Land and Leadership Initiative, and the "Can we Rehydrate California?" Initiative. She is a Planning Commissioner for her town, a member of the Vermont State-appointed Payment For Ecosystem Services and Soil Health Working Group and is on the board of directors of the Soil Carbon Coalition and the Vermont Healthy Soils Coalition. She led a successful effort to conserve the Zebedee Headwaters Wetlands while serving as a Vermont Conservation Commissioner.
She is currently working on projects with the UN-FAO Farmer Field School program, and the Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming Initiative (APCNF) in India (involving over 700,000 farmers).
She is the author of The Ecology of Care: Medicine, Agriculture, Money, and the Quiet Power of Human and Microbial Communities; and Understanding Soil Health and Watershed Function: A Teacher's Manual (available as a free download at www.landandleadership.org). She is a contributing author for the Regenerative Economy Collaborative (on Medium.com); Health in the Anthropocene (Univ. of Waterloo); the upcoming Barefoot Guide to Climate Change; and the upcoming volume Climate Crisis and Creation Care (Cambridge Scholars.)
You can follow her @DidiPershouse on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Patreon.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Reading The Ecology of Care is like sitting in Didi's living room having a chat and a cup of tea. Her friendly, articulate and flowing writing style invites you into her panoramic overview of our health dilemmas, personal and planetary. She addresses painful subjects gently and compassionately and offers long-forgotten alternatives that are as old as the human race. She takes on the daunting task of connecting all the pieces in our fractured modern puzzle to emerge with an ecology of health that connects our frontal lobes to our gut microbes to the air we breathe, the food we eat and the places we walk. Then she travels the dots to global warming, soils, and regenerating our life-support systems. Everything is truly, literally, connected to everything else. Our health is no different.
As she says about hunter-gatherer healing, "It's not the list of plants that one needs, nor even the list of illnesses that each plant treats - it's the living, ongoing relationships between the practitioner, the herbs, the patient, and the landscape that form a whole system of indigenous health care." Didi has woven a story of how we can re-connect to our ancient ways of health, including the health of Mother Earth.
FULL DISCLOSURE: I have the good fortune of knowing Didi personally as a colleague in restoring ecosystems, and as a trained naturopathic physician I deeply appreciate her essential community healing perspective that is so often missing in the offices of medical "professionals" - including alternative practitioners who would like to do better but don't quite know how. The Ecology of Care is a thoughtful and heartfelt roadmap for our perilous times.









