The War in the Country

An award-winning writer's provocative look at rural communities and a passionate call to arms to save them.

Rural life in North America has changed dramatically over the past fifty years. The few remaining family farms now struggle to survive. They have been replaced by corporate-backed factory farms, mining interests, and large-scale tourism developments, all favoured by governments with little understanding of or sympathy for traditional rural life-a life that is sustainable and healthy.

Pawlick, himself a farmer, uses the microcosm of his own rural community in eastern Ontario to portray the groups involved around the world who are waging a war to save their rural way of life. The outcome of these clashes will decide not only the future of rural life globally but also the quality and sustainability of our food, our water, our soil, and our air-of the environment on which we depend for survival. The War in the Country argues, passionately and persuasively, that every one of us must join the fight to secure our food future.

Thomas F. Pawlick has more than thirty-five years of experience as a journalist and editor, specializing in science, environmental, and agricultural reporting. He is a three-time winner of the Canadian Science Writers' Association Award and received a National Magazine Award for his agricultural reporting. Pawlick holds a masters degree in farm journalism and is the author of ten books, including the best-selling The End of Food. He served six years as chief editor of Ceres magazine, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization's flagship publication. He currently lives on a 150-acre farm in eastern Ontario.

"Thomas Pawlick's new book The War in the Country: How the Fight to save Rural Life will shape our Future is a rip snorting, page turner filled with intrigue, violence, deception, and greed." -Rabble.ca

"An impassioned expose of the complicated politics and players behind why our food choices in Canada continue to shrink or are driven into an underground economy." -Canadian Geographic

"Here, Pawlick chronicles how global forces - from rapacious mining developments to factory farming to poor tax policy - are affecting the countryside for the worse in his own eastern Ontario backyard. A lament for an agricultural nation - and a passionate call to arms." -Green Living

"Reading The War in the Country was very worthwhile for the stories of tension, trauma, cultural clashes and urban economics that are forcing change in rural areas . . . And give Thomas Pawlick a nod for believing that a wide alliance of interests is necessary if country folk are to have a say in managing the all-pervasive urban influence." -Alternatives General