Cultivating During Wartime

Cultivating During Wartime: Knowledge and Resilience of the World is a practical and urgent guide to growing food, preserving resources and building resilience in times of war, disruption and ecological crisis.

Moving between past, present and future, it explores how communities have continued to cultivate under extreme pressure: from wartime France and Cuba’s Special Period to Syria, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, the Himalayas and other regions where conflict, scarcity and instability have forced people to adapt. Through these examples, the book shows how food growing becomes not only a survival strategy, but also a source of autonomy and hope.

Alongside these stories, the book offers accessible guidance on practical self-sufficiency: seed saving, food preservation without electricity, low-input natural farming, water management, crop rotation, household planning, composting, living fences and small-scale systems for producing food and other essentials with limited means. It also introduces resilient heritage crops and traditional ecological knowledge drawn from farmers and communities across different environments.

This is not simply a gardening handbook or a theoretical resilience manual. It is an illustrated introduction to cultivation under pressure, grounded in lived experience, ecological knowledge and the practical intelligence of communities who have learned to grow in difficult times.