Harvest AUTHOR Edward Posnett Summary ☆ 8

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Harvest AUTHOR Edward Posnett Summary ☆ 8 Edward Posnett à 8 review In a centuries old tradition farmers in northwestern Iceland scour remote coastal plains for the down of nesting eider ducksHigh inside a vast cave in Borneo men perched atop rickety ladders collect swiftlets’ nests a delicacy believed to be a cure for almost anythingEiderdown and edible birds’ nests both are luxury products ultimately destined for the super rich To the rest of the world these materials are mere commodities but to the harvesters the A book that makes you think and even Goggle a few things

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Harvest AUTHOR Edward Posnett Summary ☆ 8 Edward Posnett à 8 review Y are all imbued with myth tradition folklore and ritual and form part of a shared identity and historyThese objects are two of the seven natural wonders whose stories Harvest tells eiderdown vicuña wool sea silk vegetable ivory civet coffee guano and edible birds’ nests Harvest follows their journey from the wildest parts of the planet traversing Iceland Indonesia and Peru to its urban centres drawing on the voices of the gatherers shearers and entr In Strange Harvests Edward Posnett investigates the ways that our relationship with nature has been broken by capitalism and uses a curiosity cabinet of natural objects to force his readers to look around their own homes and ask where from and by what processes they obtained the ordinary artifacts that make up their daily lives Posnett often refers to the Victorian uest genre and his work mimics it taking him to far away places subjecting him to trials and sometimes imparting bleak and sober lessons about our impact on nature He begins with the Icelandic and possibly utopic harvest of eiderdown He looks into the systems of profit that rules its harvest most of the profit does not go to those doing the work as well as the division of labor women are very involved in this work and finally into what we destroy arctic foxes in this case to protect a species we see as valuable Our next stop is in the nearly insensate cave walls of Borneo where the subject of the dangerous work of retrieving bird s nests encompasses issues such as clashes between East and West monocultural agriculture and fears about dampening or obscuring native voices Similar chapters on civet coffee sea silk tagua nuts and vicuna wool take on other such hard hitting issues like conservation cruelty fraud animal display personal ethics and slavery In the end the importance of Posnett s work may not be the interesting modern day curiosity cabinet he assembles but the ways in which his work asks readers to come to know the products of their own lives What is natural Biodegradable Ethical What are the origins of the objects we live with Where have they come from and who helped bring them to us If readers grapple with these uestions we might come to live in a sustainable world

Harvest AUTHOR Edward Posnett Summary ☆ 8 Edward Posnett à 8 review Epreneurs who harvest process and trade themBlending interviews history and travel writing Harvest sets these human stories against our changing economic and ecological landscape What do they tell us about capitalism global market forces and overharvesting How does a local micro economy survive in a hyper connected world Harvest makes us see the world with wonder curiosity and new concern It is an original and magical new map of our world and its riches The first essay about Icelandic eiderdown was the strongest The rest were solid but it didn t seem to me that the author was as excited about the other topics as they were about the first one