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    Pastoral Song
    Pastoral Song
    Pastoral Song
    Audiobook8 hours

    Pastoral Song

    Written by James Rebanks

    Narrated by Peter Noble

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The acclaimed chronicle of the regeneration of one family's traditional English farm

    NATIONAL BESTSELLER * Winner of the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing * Named ""Nature Book of the Year"" by the Sunday Times * New York Times Editors' Choice * Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize * A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Sunday Times, Financial Times, New Statesman, Independent, Telegraph, Observer, and Daily Mail

    ""Superbly written and deeply insightful, the book captivates the reader until the journey’s end.” — Wall Street Journal

    The New York Times bestselling author of The Shepherd’s Life profiles his family’s farm across three generations, revealing through this intimate lens the profound global transformation of agriculture and of the human relationship to the land.

    As a boy, James Rebanks's grandfather taught him to work the land the old way. Their family farm in England's Lake District hills was part of an ancient agricultural landscape: a patchwork of crops and meadows, of pastures grazed with livestock, and hedgerows teeming with wildlife. And yet, by the time James inherited the farm, it was barely recognizable. The men and women had vanished from the fields; the old stone barns had crumbled; the skies had emptied of birds and their wind-blown song.

    Hailed as ""a brilliant, beautiful book"" by the Sunday Times (London), Pastoral Song (published in the United Kingdom under the title English Pastoral) is the story of an inheritance: one that affects us all. It tells of how rural landscapes around the world were brought close to collapse, and the age-old rhythms of work, weather, community and wild things were lost. And yet this elegy from the northern fells is also a song of hope: of how, guided by the past, one farmer began to salvage a tiny corner of England that was now his, doing his best to restore the life that had vanished and to leave a legacy for the future.

    This is a book about what it means to have love and pride in a place, and how, against all the odds, it may still be possible to build a new pastoral: not a utopia, but somewhere decent for us all.

    [Published in the United Kingdom as English Pastoral.]

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateAug 3, 2021
    ISBN9780063073265
    Pastoral Song
    Author

    James Rebanks

    James Rebanks runs a family-owned farm in the Lake District in northern England. A graduate of Oxford University, James works as an expert advisor to UNESCO on sustainable tourism. He uses his popular Twitter feed - @herdyshepherd1 - to share updates on the shepherding year. He is the author of The Shepherd's Life.

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    Reviews for Pastoral Song

    4.5/5

    91 ratings6 reviews

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    • 5/5
      A true story giving hope to future generations. I loved hearing it.
    • 3/5
      The pace and structure of this book reflects in some ways the life Rebanks has lived: to get to the beauty and the joy, you have do a lot of hard, dirty, slogging work. It is to Rebanks's credit that he makes it worth it. Raised at the cusp of an agricultural revolution, he learns much of "the old way" of farming: small in scale, mixing livestock and crops, and integrating them into a whole, from his granddad. His own dad struggles to keep it going, but faces unbearable pressure from the new, competitive, commercial, technology-driven ways. When James steps in to take over, he has to choose, and this is the story of what he chose and why.First he tells the story of his grandfather and his own education as a boy, learning and absorbing how it's done, and has been literally for hundreds of years. This is an often lyrical, sometimes nostalgic, classic rural-memoir stuff that the Brits have done well for generations. It's slow-paced, sometimes verges on "heartwarming," and could have used some editing as it meanders on for many pages. But it sets the stage. The second part explains how it all went to hell, with machinery and toxic chemicals and a ferocious and distorted market, forcing farmers to "feed the world" instead of their families and community, with the consequent poisoning and disruption of the soil, animals wild and domesticated, the plants, towns, families and farmers. In the third - and to my mind, the best, part is when James makes his choice to turn back, to aim for health of his farm, his animals, his soil, his earth. He had a bit of a head start, as his own family traditions had not gone so far down the modern road as to be irretrievable. A soil scientist is delighted to tell him his analysis shows his soil is still the healthiest in his district. He also has a university education and a profession that pays the bills (he is an expert advisor to Unesco), as he flatly acknowledges that farming the way he would like to means you will go bankrupt. Period. Some environmentalists would say he should give it up and let his 185 acres simply go wild. But even on his hill farm, it's probably too late to just walk away. So he tries to strike a balance, helping streams revert to natural courses, planting thousands of trees, rotating his pastures and plantings, scheduling mowing around nesting birds, and tweaking his livestock (sheep and cattle) by bringing in hardier, sturdier, more versatile breeds who will graze the weeds, churn the soil, drop healthy fertilizing manure, and cope with conditions as they are in the fells with less need for drugs, stabling, and other interventions. The final passage is one of great beauty: he and his youngest daughter out in the meadow as a barn owl swoops and dives and swirls in the falling dusk. There is a barn it can live in safely, there are unpoisoned fields where the mice and voles it is hunting can live, and where his animals feed and fertilize and work the soil to support them all. Rebanks's goal is not a wilderness, but a healthy farm. And we need more of those.
    • 5/5
      ENGLISH PASTORAL : AN INHERITANCE is written by James Rebanks.His previous books include THE SHEPHERD’S LIFE and THE ILLUSTRATED HERDWICK SHEPHERD. James Rebanks is a farmer in the Lake District of England, where his family has lived and worked for over 6oo years. His writing is very descriptive, historical, emotional and very lyrical.ENGLISH PASTORAL has been described as “beautiful and shocking”; “a beautifully written story of a family, a home and a changing landscape”; “told with humility and grace, this story of farming over three generations will be our land’s salvation’.As a shepherdess and farmer by desire, but not by practicality and trade, I have read many ecological and farming-related books. This one is so personal, so beautifully and lovingly written - it is head over heels above all the rest.ENGLISH PASTORAL is many things:It is a memoir; a family history; a naturalist’s diary; very emotional; aspirational; interesting.It is ‘rough’ at times, speaking of hardship and confusion; a science textbook at times; very practical. It is an ode to the writings of Wendell Berry, Jane Jacobs and of course, Rachel Carson.I would give this book 100 stars if I could. *****
    • 4/5
      A thoroughly engaging memoir of the author's personal journey to becoming a proud inheritor of the family fell farm in England's Lake District, and his exploration of what that does--and ought--to mean in the 21st century. A cautiously optimistic assessment of how badly we have screwed up our relationship with the land and its other inhabitants in the quest to feed Earth's human population, and how we might change that. The US Midwest is Rebanks' ultimate paradigm for misguided land use, but UK commercial farming comes up smelling like acidic green muck as well.
    • 4/5
      Rebanks' family have been fell (hill) farmers in Cumbria in the north of England since 1400-something. It's mind-boggling to think of belonging so truly to a particular spot on earth.This book is best when he is simply describing his farm, and his grandfather, and his father. The past two generations began to 'modernize', 'get big or get out', mow down hedgerows, specialize, feed silage rather than hay, and above all apply synthetic fertilizers. These things degrade the land and ultimately the farmers themselves. Rebanks is now trying to rejuvenate his farm by going back to the old ways, and the even older ways of setting nature back to rights in certain areas. He thus has to supplement his reduced farm income by selling books; and I'm only too happy to help him along in the endeavor.
    • 4/5
      Very well written, but the second half becomes a bit of a looping braggadocious message. The answer appears to be a world full of bestselling authors that can afford to farm by permaculture.