Overview

In Fruits of Eden, author Patricia Damery takes readers on a thirty-year journey, vividly recounting her citizen activism to protect the world-famous Napa Valley from the ravages of over-development, water plundering, government failures, greed, and damaging tourism. Damery's articulate and Illustrative voice is a powerful call that interweaves the story of her ranch with her history, reflections, marriage, and her husband's onset of dementia. His Alzheimer's began at the same time as pressure on the ranch's sustainability became acute. Conversely, there is also great hope. The author's relationships with colleagues in action for the valley, her children, her grandchildren and friends all share a deep love for this extraordinary place on the planet. Over the decades Damery and her husband, Donald Harms, developed a way of life that respected the natural ecology of their land in the Napa Valley. They applied organic and biodynamic methods, left large parts in their natural state, and had a herd of goats that lived next to Patricia's writing studio. Then climate change coupled with egregious overdevelopment overcame them, threatening to destroy their way of life. Destruction of native oaks caused erosion and groundwater depletion, insecticide use disrupted the balance of animal life, including beneficial insects, population density and tourism brought air pollution and congestion, and finally global warming brought repeated fires, a risk that continues today.

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9781958263075

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Reviews

Napa is a special place, for its beauty, and for the care some of its residents take in protecting it even in these dire decades of climate chaos. That shines through in these pages. Bill McKibben, author The End of Nature This is so refreshingly far from the usual Napa Valley memoir as to constitute a new genre. Instead of self celebration so common, it's at once a full autobiography, a paene to the natural world, and a vivid lesson in the challenges and rewards of working the land oneself. In the course of unwrapping her personal history, the author lays out her considerable involvement in the efforts of environmentalists in Napa toslow down the ravages of development of the one of the most famous and threatened valleys on Earth. -JAMES CONWAY, author of Napa at Last Light As a personal long-time friend to Patricia, I have always been amazed by her open heart, her open eyes, her intense willingness to put to word to what so many can barely conceptualize or articulate. She gives wings to our wounded hearts and overwhelming feelings of helplessness in the face of the mass destruction of our Home planet. Guiding us on a dream walk, Patricia inspires us towards collective action in accepting the sacred responsibility to reach to our highest collective potential as care givers of Mother Earth. -CHARLIE TOLEDO, Executive Director, Suscol Intertribal Council An alchemical book, Fruits of Eden is the record of one soul's deepening and complexifying through the mystery of committed relationships -- with a wonderful husband whose memory is slowly slipping away, with an eloquent and sagacious tree, with the imagist magic of dreams, and with the exhilarating but difficult practice of democracy itself. And, underlying and sustaining all those ongoing relations, the booktracks the author's soulful metamorphosis through her full-bodied and fiercely committed relationship with a powerful piece of land, a worthy place on the breathing earth. - DAVID ABRAM, author of Becoming Animal and The Spell of the Sensuous In this riveting book, activism in the world and contemplation of the sacred and profane, with its glimpses of wholeness and pain of fragmentation, go hand in hand. Fruits of Eden narrates the journey of anabsolutely unique person in an absolutely singular place at a ripe ti me of Kairos that simultaneously becomes a microcosm of the whole world. This is an extraordinary book by an extraordinary human being. -TOM SINGER, Editor of Cultural Complexes and The Soul of America: Myth, Psyche, and Politics.

"""Napa is a special place, for its beauty, and for the care some of its residents take in protecting it even in these dire decades of climate chaos. That shines through in these pages."" Bill McKibben, author The End of Nature This is so refreshingly far from the usual Napa Valley memoir as to constitute a new genre. Instead of self celebration so common, it's at once a full autobiography, a paene to the natural world, and a vivid lesson in the challenges and rewards of working the land oneself. In the course of unwrapping her personal history, the author lays out her considerable involvement in the efforts of environmentalists in Napa toslow down the ravages of development of the one of the most famous and threatened valleys on Earth. -JAMES CONWAY, author of Napa at Last Light As a personal long-time friend to Patricia, I have always been amazed by her open heart, her open eyes, her intense willingness to put to word to what so many can barely conceptualize or articulate. She gives wings to our wounded hearts and overwhelming feelings of helplessness in the face of the mass destruction of our Home planet. Guiding us on a dream walk, Patricia inspires us towards collective action in accepting the sacred responsibility to reach to our highest collective potential as care givers of Mother Earth. -CHARLIE TOLEDO, Executive Director, Suscol Intertribal Council An alchemical book, Fruits of Eden is the record of one soul's deepening and complexifying through the mystery of committed relationships -- with a wonderful husband whose memory is slowly slipping away, with an eloquent and sagacious tree, with the imagist magic of dreams, and with the exhilarating but difficult practice of democracy itself. And, underlying and sustaining all those ongoing relations, the booktracks the author's soulful metamorphosis through her full-bodied and fiercely committed relationship with a powerful piece of land, a worthy place on the breathing earth. - DAVID ABRAM, author of Becoming Animal and The Spell of the Sensuous In this riveting book, activism in the world and contemplation of the sacred and profane, with its glimpses of wholeness and pain of fragmentation, go hand in hand. Fruits of Eden narrates the journey of anabsolutely unique person in an absolutely singular place at a ripe ti me of Kairos that simultaneously becomes a microcosm of the whole world. This is an extraordinary book by an extraordinary human being. -TOM SINGER, Editor of Cultural Complexes and The Soul of America: Myth, Psyche, and Politics."

Author Information

Patricia Damery has lived on her ranch in the Napa Valley for over 40 years. She applied organic, biodynamic methods to the growing of grapes and lavender, while also practicing as a Jungian psychoanalyst and publishing numerous articles and four books. A Board Member of the activist group Napa Vision 2050 and co-editor of its newsletter, Eyes on Napa, she served on the Executive Committee of the Napa Sierra Club and has been an active participant on the Sierra Club Redwood Chapter's Northern California Forest Committee, Oak Working Group. She maintains a blog at https: //www.patriciadamery.com. Deborah O'Grady is a fine art photographer and videographer with exhibitions and commissions from Stockholm to Buenos Aires and Washington DC to California. She has collaborated extensively with orchestras, including with the Saint Louis Symphony, Sydney Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the United States Navy Band, creating live-synced video projections to accompany performances of Olivier Messiaen's From the Canyons to the Stars.

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