A Guide to Living in and with Nature

What the ancients can teach us about cultivating a sustainable world.

By Kurt CaswellJanuary 13, 2026

• Philosophy & Religion

• Environment

ON THE ONE HAND, I know that no one has the answers to the questions we face in a warming world. On the other hand, I read M. D. Usher’s wonderful new book, Following Nature’s Lead: Ancient Ways of Living in a Dying World, hoping to find those answers, or at least the vision of a more livable future. Perhaps nothing so flaccid as hope, but a path to believing in humanity’s better nature, one grounded in community and reciprocity. But it’s just not here, not in this book, perhaps not in any book. Usher well knows, I imagine, that building such a trapdoor in a story like the one he is telling does no one any good. We can escape from darkness only into denial or maybe apathy. I don’t know which is worse, or which is better. We cannot go around, Hamlet tells us, we must go through. And what we find on the other side, as Freud later writes, we must learn to endure with resignation.

Despite his failure to answer unanswerable questions, there is so much to admire about Usher’s book, just as there is no shortage of reasons to read it. On my desk right now is a stack of 13 pages of notes I made, some of them passages I felt compelled to copy down, others my own thoughts in response to Usher and his ruminations. These notes stand as a confession of what I do not know, as I am not well read in the literature and philosophy of ancient Greece and Rome. I am, however, an admirer and willing recipient of those original voices, voices that have come down to us across so many centuries without diminishment in relevance or potency. So then, one of the first challenges of reading Following Nature’s Lead is to learn what the ancients have written, and it is Usher’s challenge to teach us.

Usher, an academic classicist, once worked as a carpenter and currently works as a farmer; he and his wife operate a farm on which they raise sheep, cows, and chickens; manage maple sugar bush; and dabble, as he puts it, in bees, pigs, and goats. Usher is an everyman as much as he is exceptional, not unlike the philosophers and historians about whom he reads and writes. He has constructed a life ideal for understanding the ancient past against our volatile present. And now he has written a book through which he may share that understanding with all of us.

Following Nature’s Lead is organized into four parts, with helpful illustrations, notes, and an epilogue that unifies his main points. In fact, in the epilogue, Usher unifies his main points into a single, long sentence, which I offer here as a way to open the book to page one:

Some shared, fruitful ideas that I see as worth preserving from the ancient texts discussed in these sermons—works by Lucretius, Plato, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Diogenes, Seneca, and their various epigones like Whitman, Uexküll, Thoreau, Ruskin, and Bataille—are a clarion call to simple, mindful living, a recognition and embracing of natural limits, an affective deference to Nature’s organization and natural laws—indeed its awesome beauty—and an underlying nonreductive physicalism, founded on empirical, rational enquiry, that acknowledges unseen realities.

What a sentence! That Usher refers to what he has written as a series of “sermons” is fitting, as he celebrates the physical limits of human life in companionship with nature’s beauty and mystery, its “unseen realities.” He is a teacher, though, more than a preacher, insistent on rational thought (realities), yet always ready to exclaim in wonder at nature’s miracles (the unseen). It is this combination that makes us human and makes Usher’s book so worth reading.

When I first read the book’s subtitle, I wanted to reject its claim that our world is “dying.” Now, having read the book—and considered it alongside current global instabilities due to climate change, political dissociation, and the emergence of AI, among other calamities—I’m not so sure. What does it mean for a world to die, anyway? Is Mars dead? Maybe our world really is dying, at least dying into a future unsuitable for us. And if it is, one cause is that we have all forgotten how to live. Systems of power want us to forget. Indeed, they thrive on our forgetting, and on silencing those who would help us remember. We need guidance now, and Usher’s book is one such guide, renewing the covenant we once honored with the ancients and with the natural world.

I much admire what Usher has to say about animals. Aristotle maintains, as Usher reminds us, that “to study animals […] is to hold up a mirror to ourselves,” since we “are animals, too.” Animals, even those “less pleasing to the senses,” have been formed by nature’s purpose to take their place “among what counts as beautiful.” And beauty is one aesthetic by which we may realign ourselves with our world.

Beyond the more complacent admiration of beauty, animals teach us something about economy, as they use exactly what they need and nothing more. Usher quotes the designer and craftsman William Morris in this regard: “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or think to be beautiful.” Later in the book, Usher brings us to Socrates’s observation that his (fifth-century BCE) civilization was “sick and swollen with the fever of luxury and indulgence.” If Socrates could only see us now. The luxury and indulgence of our own 21st-century civilization has Usher stating (and he is heartbreakingly right) that “we all seem to yearn for simplicity, for a return to some prelapsarian state.” A study of animals, and of nature itself, can help us remember that “simple, mindful living, a recognition and embracing of natural limits, [and] an affective deference to Nature’s organization and natural laws” are principles on which to craft our lives.

Fascinating and frightening is Usher’s discussion of money and the global economy, which is in fact the opposite of economy. He brings in the work of John Ruskin and Georges Bataille to conclude that the economy is “a system in which energy is circulated and distributed.” And then he cites Tim Morgan to confirm that the economy is, ultimately, “a surplus energy equation,” and so “governed by the physical laws of thermodynamics, and not by the man-made ‘laws’ of the market.” We learn that banks print money in the modern economy “ex nihilo.” And ultimately, because we are tied “to the welfare of Earth and its progenitor, the Sun, […] spending down Nature’s capital reserves of energy, as we are doing, is profligate and self-destructive.” You begin to understand that this recklessness and disregard for future generations, and for all living beings, has been passed down through the centuries in the same way that the abused becomes the abuser. And what is even more disquieting is that we’ve known this all along. Usher teaches us that “our most thoughtful forebears decried consumption, extravagance, and excess and eschewed it with such vigor—on ethical grounds, as well as practical ones.”

Is there any good news, then, about where we are headed? Can there be any good news in a world like ours or in a book like this? Usher writes with a gentle, measured urgency that has me believing in him, and in his ancients, and at the same time in an unknowable, darkening future. Nature itself is resilient, Usher tells us, and “resilience in Nature can, if we follow its lead, serve as a model for our own responses to climate trauma and all the other residuals caused by modern lifestyles.” These words are part of the achievement of Following Nature’s Lead, the evocation of an atmosphere of reason and heart where, with Usher’s guidance, we may gain enough courage to look directly into the future we are now creating.