Gardening in the Ruins

This is the reference book for dealing with the industrial world's assaults on our garden plots, for getting your hands dirty with full knowledge of the facts.
Cultivating your own garden often offers a kind of refuge, especially in a context of profound ecological upheaval. However, the vegetable garden is not an oasis cut off from the world. Whether by air, water, or soil, it is subject to the toxic assaults of our industrial lifestyles, which have introduced into the environment a whole series of new entities resulting from chemistry, genetic "engineering," or extraction.
Gardening in Ruins is both an essay on the main contaminants in our gardens and a manual for dealing with our toxic legacy. It sets out the ecological challenges posed by each major family of contaminants (ozone, acid deposition, heavy metals, PAHs, pesticides, GMOs, plastics, nanomaterials, drugs, radionuclides) and shows us how to limit the damage to our vegetable plants through a series of very concrete questions: how can we do without plastic? should we try to modify the pH of our soil? kill slugs?
Like a neighbor drawing on her field experience, Bertille Darragon provides a wealth of information that ultimately invites us to collective and political action. She offers a remedy for the resignation and withdrawal that can be provoked by the anxiety of ecological collapse. More than just a gardening treatise, Gardening in Ruins is destined to become the reference work for dealing with the industrial world's assaults on our garden plots and getting our hands in the soil with full knowledge of the facts.