'Without vision the people perish.' So wrote the poet William Blake. Lord Northbourne 1896-1982 was a man of exceptional and comprehensive vision, who diagnosed the sickness of modern society as stemming from the severance of its organic links with the wholeness of life. But like his better-known younger contemporary E. F. Schumacher author of Small is Beautiful, whose work developed along very similar lines, Northbourne's occupation as a practicing organic farmer he coined the term was joined to a deep conviction that humanity does not live by bread alone, and that the fullness of life properly integral to human nature demands obedience to sacred law. Thus his vision of life came to embrace the interrelationship of God, humanity, and the soil as a unity presupposing a way of life in stark contrast to that of the myopic, mechanististic world he saw encroaching on all sides. And so, as it becomes increasingly evident that such a way of life stands to emperil our very future and that of