These Rugged Days

Secession -- War in the valley -- Mobile under blockade -- Streight's Raid, 1863 -- Rousseau's Raid, 1864 -- The Battle of Mobile Bay -- Wilson's Raid, 1865 -- The Mobile campaign -- Montgomery Falls

Secession -- War in the valley -- Mobile under blockade -- Streight's Raid, 1863 -- Rousseau's Raid, 1864 -- The Battle of Mobile Bay -- Wilson's Raid, 1865 -- The Mobile campaign -- Montgomery Falls

Become self-reliant, live off the land, and be prepared for the unexpected in this modern guide to self-sufficiency and homesteading from New York Times bestselling author, retired Navy SEAL, and survival skills expert Clint Emerson. “Add The Rugged Life by former Navy SEAL Clint Emerson to your library today and get on the path to independence and self-sufficiency.”—Jack Carr, Navy SEAL Sniper and #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Devil’s Hand Clint Emerson is the go-to expert for surviving the first minutes, hours, and days of a crisis. Now, in The Rugged Life, he works with modern homesteading experts to show you how to thrive over the long-term—for months, years, or even a lifetime—by being prepared and self-sufficient. You can live the Rugged Life completely off-the-grid by farming your own food and using the waste from your toilet for compost. Or, you can live it by adding solar panels to your suburban home and keeping chickens and bees in your backyard. You can even live the Rugged Life in a city by simply gathering the salad for tonight’s dinner from your windowsill garden. Each of these homesteading and prepper long-term survival skills stand on their own, and taken together, they can help you design the independent life you want for yourself and your family. • Be your own homesteader: Make your own shampoo and face creams; pickle and ferment food; make natural bug spray and cleaning products; smoke meat; tan a hide • Be your own protector: Create a last-resort emergency plan; gather medicinal plants; protect against dangerous animals and threats; understand survival first aid • Be your own provider: Hunt for game; make a gillnet; set snares; forage for wild foods; build a rabbit hutch; ice fish; butcher a pig; keep bees • Be your own builder: Retrofit a van; set up solar, microhydro, and geothermal power; create a water catchment and filtration system; build a shipping container home • Be your own farmer: Grow a victory garden; build a greenhouse; waffle garden to save space and resources; build a root cellar; can, dry, and store crops; operate a tractor With hundreds of step-by-step, illustrated, self-sustaining skills and projects, The Rugged Life is for everyone who feels they can use more adventure, freedom, and choice in their life—everyone ready to get out of their comfort zone and try new, hard, profoundly rewarding things.

Today, American "rugged individualism" is in a fight for its life on two battlegrounds: in the policy realm and in the intellectual world of ideas that may lead to new policies. In this book, the authors look at the political context in which rugged individualism flourishes or declines and offer a balanced assessment of its future prospects. They outline its path from its founding—marked by the Declaration of Independence—to today, focusing on different periods in our history when rugged individualism was thriving or was under attack. The authors ultimately look with some optimism toward new frontiers of the twenty-first century that may nourish rugged individualism. They assert that we cannot tip the delicate balance between equality and liberty so heavily in favor of equality that there is no liberty left for individual Americans to enjoy.

A captivating narrative guidebook to inspire everyone, no matter their abilities, to get outside and experience the country’s natural landscapes. When Kellisa Kain was born premature with significant developmental and physical disabilities, she wasn’t expected to survive her first 24 hours. She defied the odds, and 20 years later she and her father, Christopher Kain, have pushiked using a specialized mobility chair across the entire United States. In Rugged Access for All: A Guide for Pushiking America’s Diverse Trails with Mobility Chairs and Strollers, Chris and Kellisa showcase some of the greatest trails across the US that can be completed while pushiking—hiking with someone in a wheelchair, mobility chair, or stroller. Part narrative, part guide, this book includes detailed trail descriptions, trail maps, tips for hiking with a stroller or mobility chair, and vibrant stories from Chris and Kellisa’s own experiences hiking in all 50 states. The featured trails vary in difficulty, from deserts to mountains and everything in between. Sometimes even a stroll around the block can have frustrating barriers to those with wheels, and this can lead to families staying inside too often. Rugged Access for All gives families the knowledge, confidence, and direction to travel and experience the wonders of nature, no matter what mobility challenges they may face.

"Nature-study not only educates, but it educates nature-ward; and nature is ever our companion, whether we will or no. Even though we are determined to shut ourselves in an office, nature sends her messengers. The light, the dark, the moon, the cloud, the rain, the wind, the falling leaf, the fly, the bouquet, the bird, the cockroach-they are all ours. If one is to be happy, he must be in sympathy with common things. He must live in harmony with his environment. One cannot be happy yonder nor tomorrow: he is happy here and now, or never. Our stock of knowledge of common things should be great. Few of us can travel. We must know the things at home."—from "The Meaning of the Nature-study Movement" "To feel that one is a useful and cooperating part in nature is to give one kinship, and to open the mind to the great resources and the high enthusiasms. Here arise the fundamental common relations. Here arise also the great emotions and conceptions of sublimity and grandeur, of majesty and awe, the uplift of vast desires—when one contemplates the earth and the universe and desires to take them into the soul and to express oneself in their terms; and here also the responsible practices of life take root."—from The Holy Earth Before Wendell Berry and Aldo Leopold, there was the horticulturalist and botanist Liberty Hyde Bailey (1858–1954). For Wendell Berry, Bailey was a revelation, a symbol of the nature-minded agrarianism Berry himself popularized. For Aldo Leopold, Bailey offered a model of the scholar-essayist-naturalist. In his revolutionary work of eco-theology, The Holy Earth, Bailey challenged the anthropomorphism—the people-centeredness—of a vulnerable world. A trained scientist writing in the lyrical tradition of Emerson, Burroughs, and Muir, Bailey offered the twentieth century its first exquisitely interdisciplinary biocentric worldview; this Michigan farmer's son defined the intellectual and spiritual foundations of what would become the environmental movement. For nearly a half century, Bailey dominated matters agricultural, environmental, and scientific in the United States. He worked both to improve the lives of rural folk and to preserve the land from which they earned their livelihood. Along the way, he popularized nature study in U.S. classrooms, lobbied successfully for women's rights on and off the farm, and bulwarked Teddy Roosevelt's pioneering conservationism. Here for the first time is an anthology of Bailey's most important writings suitable for the general and scholarly reader alike. Carefully selected and annotated by Zachary Michael Jack, this book offers a comprehensive introduction to Bailey's celebrated and revolutionary thinking on the urgent environmental, agrarian, educational, and ecospiritual dilemmas of his day and our own. Culled from ten of Bailey's most influential works, these lyrical selections highlight Bailey's contributions to the nature-study and the Country Life movements. Published on the one-hundredth anniversary of Bailey's groundbreaking report on behalf of the Country Life Commission, Liberty Hyde Bailey: Essential Agrarian and Environmental Writings will inspire a new generation of nature writers, environmentalists, and those who share with Bailey a profound understanding of the elegance and power of the natural world and humanity's place within it.