One Straw Revolution Book Review

Katie Wandrey

Professor Santos

English 102-042

8 April 2018

The One-Straw Revolution

            Fukuoka’s book opened my eyes to many different aspects of human nature and nature in itself because of his method of farming. At first, this book seemed to be another book about how to farm the land correctly and what benefits there are to farm commercially. I clearly had no idea what insights Masanobu Fukuoka was about to share with me. He critics man-kinds habits, especially scientist’s methods and offers a farming strategy that goes against every modern farming method called, “do nothing farming”.  In this method, nature does what nature is good at, growing and providing for plants and the environment. Rather than fertilizing, dropping mass amounts of chemicals onto crops and weeding by tillage, Fukuoka stresses that by observing nature run its course and not attempting to alter that course, farming the land and getting a crop yield that matches or exceeds modern farming methods is attainable through natural farming. By stressing “lazy” farming, Fukuoka strengthens his point that humans try too hard to obtain results that could happen with hardy as much work. Nature is unbalanced, and I agree with Fukuoka that humans are at fault. He says, “The reason that man's improved techniques seem to be necessary is that the natural balance has been so badly upset beforehand by those same techniques that the land has become dependent on them” (Fukuoka, 15). Because of man-kind’s footprint on this Earth, we have altered the nature of this planet’s environment. Fukuoka speaks of many faults of humans and how we should lean towards a “How about not doing this?” (15) mindset which I also agree with. Kim Jordan says in her review of this book, “As humans, we like to control non-human things that can work just fine without us. Take insects, spiders, plants, and worms, all of which manage to find a balance in fields without chemicals, machinery, or fertilizer” (Jordan).  She exemplifies Fukuoka’s message throughout his book, which is the unbalance of nature caused by humans.  I would recommend this book to anyone who thinks of our society as a joke. Anyone who thinks that how we spend our day to day lives working to make money is basically wasting our lives away, is who I recommend this book to. Fukuoka loves bashing today’s world, especially scientists, and it was very amusing and entertaining for me to read.

Book review Source:
Jordan, Kim. “The One-Straw Revolution .” Alimentum: The Literature of Food, www.alimentumjournal.com/review-of-one-straw-revolution#.Wsu-6ExFyhc.