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Author Shannon Hayes lives on a farm with her family, grows her own food and wears secondhand clothes. In her thought-provoking book, Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity From a Consumer Culture, Hayes touts the benefits of domestic skills—but not in a throwback to the 1950s housewife. Instead, she interviews 20 modern “radical homemakers” (women and men) who believe that solving the world’s ecological and societal woes begins at home. Hayes explores how the Industrial Revolution turned Americans into consumers of mass-produced goods and created an “extractive” vs. “life-serving” economy, where people seek happiness through financial affluence. Then, radical homemakers offer their life advice: nurture relationships, barter for goods, reject materialism, rediscover the taste of homegrown food and more. Hayes sees this lifestyle as the way to live. “In a time of climate crisis, peak oil, and worldwide economic and social unrest,” Hayes writes, “it may be the only thing that saves us.”