Home: Is Modern Civilization Destroying the World That Keeps It Alive?
Paperback
PhilosophyEnvironmental StudiesNature Writing
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: May 3 2026
Pages: 336
Weight: 0.90
Height: 0.84 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
What if the world is not ending loudly, but quietly entering your house?
A room that no longer cools at night. A child who begins to mistrust the sky. A river that forgets its old shape. A hospital ward where the air becomes heavier than the official alert. A packed bag by the door that a mother calls precaution, while her daughter calls it the leaving bag.
HOME is not another ordinary book about the environment, politics, or the future. It is a haunting literary nonfiction work about the hidden war beneath modern life: the war between the civilization we built and the living world still forced to carry us.
With a voice that is intimate, philosophical, disturbing, and sharply human, ROLFF P. leads the reader through houses, cities, rivers, hospitals, forests, screens, markets, coastlines, and children's questions to reveal a deeper wound: modern civilization has learned to call extraction progress, speed maturity, consumption freedom, and damage normal.
This is not a book that begins with slogans. It begins with home.
Across Europe, Brazil, Morocco, Tunisia, India, Singapore, Canada, Jordan, Bangladesh, Fiji, South Africa, Japan, Nigeria, Samoa, and beyond, HOME follows ordinary human moments where the crisis of the living world becomes impossible to keep abstract. A girl draws a tree from memory. A nurse reads the body before the report. A delivery rider becomes a servant of speed. A child sees noon turn orange. A grandmother teaches names before the names disappear.
Through story, moral diagnosis, spiritual pressure, and civilizational critique, this book asks a question most modern people would rather avoid:
What kind of civilization destroys the world that keeps it alive, then calls the destruction normal life?
HOME is for readers who sense that the crisis outside us is connected to the crisis inside us. It is for those who feel that modern life has become faster, richer, more connected, and somehow less human. It is for anyone who suspects that convenience has a shadow, progress has a cost, and comfort can become dangerous when it forgets the suffering that makes it possible.
This book does not offer cheap optimism. It does not sell panic. It does not ask the reader to perform guilt as virtue.
Instead, it asks for something harder.
Attention.
Responsibility.
Reverence.
A different imagination of what it means to live inside a common home.
Elegant, urgent, poetic, and unsettling, HOME belongs to the tradition of books that do not merely explain a problem, but change the room in which the problem is felt.
Because home was never just the place we return to.
Home is the world that has been carrying us all along.
Also from
P, Rolff
Also in
Nature Writing
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
Kimmerer, Robin Wall
Paperback
The Story of Birds: A New History from Their Dinosaur Origins to the Present
Brusatte, Steve
Hardcover
The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate--Discoveries from a Secret World
Wohlleben, Peter
Paperback
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
Kimmerer, Robin Wall
Hardcover
To Catch a Fish: Essays on the Joy, Frustration, Curiosity, and Allure of Fishing
Kurlansky, Mark
Hardcover
The Fullness of Time: Marking the Day by Birdsong, Blooms, Shadows, and Stars
Haynes, Cathy
Hardcover
I Have This Thing for Flowers: Essays on the Roots of Relationships
Sawchyn, Alysia Li Ying
Hardcover
World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments
Nezhukumatathil, Aimee
Paperback
In the Range of Fire and Ice: A Human and Natural History of Washington's Cascades
Williams, David B.
Hardcover
Exploring the Maine Woods - The Hardy Family Expedition to the Machias Lakes
Carbone, Tommy
Hardy Eckstorm, Fannie
Paperback
Outsider Animals: How the Creatures at the Margins of Our Lives Have the Most to Teach Us
Zuk, Marlene
Hardcover
The Shortest History of Our Universe: The Unlikely Journey from the Big Bang to Us
Baker, David
Paperback
Werner's Nomenclature of Colours: Adapted to Zoology, Botany, Chemistry, Mineralogy, Anatomy, and the Arts
Syme, Patrick
Werner
Hardcover
The Living Great Lakes: Searching for the Heart of the Inland Seas, Revised Edition
Dennis, Jerry
Paperback
Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World
Dolnick, Edward
Paperback
The Whispers of Rock: The Stories That Stone Tells about Our World and Our Lives
Khatwa, Anjana
Hardcover
The Call of the Honeyguide: What Science Tells Us about How to Live Well with the Rest of Life
Dunn, Rob
Hardcover
The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative
Williams, Florence
Paperback
We Love You: An Optimistic Guide to Life on a Rock Floating Through Space
Min, Andy
Sullivan, Thomas
Hardcover
Braiding Sweetgrass / Una Trenza de Hierba Sagrada: Sabiduría Indígena, Conocimiento Científico Y Las Enseñanzas de Las Plantas
Kimmerer, Robin Wall
Paperback
First Adirondackers: 12,000 Years of Indigenous Peoples in the Adirondack Uplands
Fadden, David Kanietakeron
Stager, Curt
Paperback
What Is Intelligence?: Lessons from AI about Evolution, Computing, and Minds
Aguera Y. Arcas, Blaise
Paperback
Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science
Bergland, Renée
Paperback
Werner's Nomenclature of Colours: Adapted to Zoology, Botany, Chemistry, Mineralogy, Anatomy, and the Arts
Syme, Patrick
Hardcover
The California Naturalist Handbook, Second Edition
Merenlender, Adina
Edelman, Deborah
De Nevers, Greg
Paperback
Bonefish Dreams: Stories, Facts, and Tips from Travels to the World's Best Destinations
Foster, Frank
Paperback
Astonished by Beauty: A Field Guide to the Practice of Paying Attention
Fleischner, Thomas Lowe
Paperback
World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments
Nezhukumatathil, Aimee
Hardcover
House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest
Childs, Craig
Paperback
Permafrost Is an Archive: And Other Inheritances from the Alaska-Yukon Borderlands
Cook, Corinna
Paperback
Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis
Proulx, Annie
Paperback
Radically Wild: True Tales of Adventure, Wilderness Survival, and Hard Lessons
Sunderwald, Scott
Paperback
Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid: The Fraught and Fascinating Biology of Climate Change
Hanson, Thor
Paperback
Seabirds as Sentinels: Auklets, Puffins, Shearwaters, and the View from Destruction Island
Wagner, Eric
Hardcover
National Geographic Backyard Guide to Edible Wild Plants
Hernandez, Mimi Prunella
Wood Buzzard, Heather
Paperback
Kinship Medicine: Cultivating Interdependence to Heal the Earth and Ourselves
Johnson, Wendy, MD MPH
Paperback
Seashells: A Compendium of Five Thousand of the World's Species
Callomon, Paul
Rosenberg, Gary
Hardcover
The Secret Knowledge of Water: Discovering the Essence of the American Desert
Childs, Craig
Paperback
Plants That Kill: A Natural History of the World's Most Poisonous Plants
Larsson, Sonny
Dauncey, Elizabeth A.
Hardcover
Animal Diaspora: Decoding Ice Age Mysteries to Reveal the Future of Migration
Struzik, Edward
Hardcover
The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks
Williams, Terry Tempest
Paperback
