After I had written the words, he pointed out all the unnecessary ones, and it is a much better book as a result. My excellent agent Jessica Woollard has done so much over the last year to shape my writer’s life into some kind of sustainable enterprise that I must owe her a good bottle of something. My friends Jay Griffiths, Em Strang and Dougie Strang commented on this book in earlier drafts, and helped make it what it has become. Martin Shaw, friend and inspiration, has taught me much over the past five years about how the land tells stories and how to listen, and his work has influenced this book. Nina Lyon and George Monbiot pointed my research in revealing directions. My fellow editors and collectivees at the Dark Mountain Project, along with the many writers whose work I have read there over the past half decade, continue to inspire and provoke. Finally, at the root of it all, my family are the soil from which everything grows.
