ROBERT TINDALL, MA, is a classical guitarist, a long-time student
of Zen Buddhism, an inveterate traveler, and the author ofThe
Jaguar that Roams the MindandThe
Shamanic Odyssey- Homer, Tolkien, and the Visionary
Experience.Tindall works as a professor of literature, and divides
his time between the San Francisco Bay Area and Peru. He leads
journeys into the Amazon rainforest and to the Andean
archaeological site ofChavin de Huantarto encounter the healing
traditions there.
FR D RIQUE APFFEL-MARGLIN, PhD, is emerita professor of
anthropology at Smith College and director and founder of the
Sachamama Center for Biocultural Regeneration in the Peruvian Upper
Amazon. She was a research associate at the World Institute for
Development Economics Research. She has authored and edited
thirteen books and published some sixty articles and book chapters,
including The Spirit of Regeneration- Andean Culture Confronting
Western Notions of Development and Subversive Spiritualities- How
Rituals Enact the World.
DAVID SHEARER, PhD, is co-founder and CEO of Full Circle Biochar, a
clean technology company developing biochar products for global
agricultural and carbon sequestration applications. He was chief
scientist at California Environmental Associates and principal
environmental scientist at AeroVironment Inc., where he worked in
next-generation transportation, energy, carbon mitigation, and
information technology. Dr. Shearer has a PhD in environmental
epidemiology and a MS in environmental microbiology from the
University of California.
“The highly qualified authors of Sacred Soil show us a way forward
toward restoring our garden planet, shifting the Earth’s carbon
balance from the oceans and the sky to the soil and living
vegetation, where it can nourish our hearts, blood, and bones and
ensure our collective thriving. It is up to all of us to act on
this knowledge.”
—Ian Baker, author of The Heart of the World
“A visionary manifesto and a pragmatic, solutions-oriented approach
to how we can heal our connection with the Earth as well as our kin
in the bacterial world, Sacred Soil offers a path for modern people
to understand the world, as many indigenous cultures do, as a vast
sentient organism.”
—Daniel Pinchbeck, author of Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic
Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism
“Tindall, Apffel-Marglin, and Shearer have taken a seemingly arcane
topic and turned it into a compellingly readable book on ecology,
indigenous wisdom, sustainable development and our relationship
with nature. Highly recommended!”
—Mark Plotkin, PhD, Amazon Conservation Team
“Sacred Soil is a major contribution to healing the septic
split dividing spirit from matter, and culture from nature, that is
poisoning all life. With soil as its exemplar—at once material,
biological, and sacred—this book reminds us that we are part of a
greater world that is alive, intelligent, and whole.”
—Patrick Curry, author of Ecological Ethics
“Magic flows in Sacred Soil, and realism beckons throughout the
mythopoeic, historical, anthropological, and scientific
perspectives on times, characters, and the fecundities of
life. These authors join imaginative writing, distinctive
research, and interdisciplinary engagement with
environmental concern in this magnificent account of how ceramic
shards, burials, and the processes of life-death make biochar
soil.”
—John A. Grim, Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale
“Over the last decades botanists and ecologists working in the
forests of the Amazon have found large but isolated expanses
of terra preta—black soil, clearly of human origins—showing
that indigenous peoples did not simply slash and burn and move on,
but chose instead to stay put, actively enhancing the agricultural
potential of the land, with charcoal for nutrient retention, and
organic waste as compost. A book examining the significance of
these new revelations, and indeed celebrating the potential of such
indigenous technologies, has been long overdue.”
—Wade Davis, professor of anthropology, University of British
Columbia
“A superb historical, ethnographic, fictional, scientific, and
applicable account of one of the wonders of humanity—the
anthropogenic black earth of the Amazon—this changes our perception
of pre-Columbian Amazonian societies, their knowledge, complexity,
and the extent of their spiritually-imbued contribution to
biodiversity. Most importantly, this work clearly indicates
possible contemporary applications of Amerindian concepts and
techniques to most needed environmental regeneration.”
—Luis Eduardo Luna, director of Wasiwaska Research Center
“This groundbreaking book reveals the hidden story of the
astonishing and profoundly ethical civilization of the Amazonian
Indians. For millennia the indigenous peoples of the Amazon rain
forest constructed a civilization of harmonious coexistence of
humans, plants, animals, physical entities, and the intangible
spiritual beings that inhabit the quantum world. And they did it by
creating and recreating their own healthy environment. This jewel
of a book is a breath of pure utopian air.”
Stefano Varese, PhD, professor emeritus, University of California,
Davis
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