Hoofprints on the Land Ilse Köhler-Rollefson
(Chelsea Green, £16.99)
SOME common sense at last. The climate-change debate has generated billions of printed words about the future of food and farming, most of them profoundly mistaken. Ilse Köhler-Rollefson emerges as a voice worth listening to in this fascinating book about traditional herding culture. As a German vet-turned-archaeologist and anthropologist who has spent decades as a camel dairy farmer in Rajasthan, she brings academic rigour, as well as practical farming experience to the debate and turns many of the preconceptions of the prevailing Western narrative upside down.
This isn’t a dry academic textbook, even if it should be required reading across multi-disciplinary university courses, as it has beautifully observed anecdotes about Raika camel herders in India and other traditional pastoralist societies with whom she has lived and clearly has great empathy.
Her basic thesis is that mankind has made
