
Description
From one of our finest writers and leading environmental thinkers, a powerful book about how the land we share divides us--and how it could unite us
Today, we are at a turning point as we face ecological and political crises that are rooted in conflicts over the land itself. But these problems can be solved if we draw on elements of our tradition that move us toward a new commonwealth--a community founded on the well-being of all people and the natural world. In this brief, powerful, timely, and hopeful book, Jedediah Purdy, one of our finest writers and leading environmental thinkers, explores how we might begin to heal our fractured and contentious relationship with the land and with each other.
From the coalfields of Appalachia and the tobacco fields of the Carolinas to the public lands of the West, Purdy shows how the land has always united and divided Americans, holding us in common projects and fates but also separating us into insiders and outsiders, owners and dependents, workers and bosses. Expropriated from Native Americans and transformed by slave labor, the same land that represents a history of racism and exploitation could, in the face of environmental catastrophe, bind us together in relationships of reciprocity and mutual responsibility.
This may seem idealistic in our polarized time, but we are at a historical fork in the road, and if we do not make efforts now to move toward a commonwealth, Purdy warns, environmental and political pressures will create harsher and crueler conflicts--between citizens, between countries, and between humans and the rest of the world.
Product Details
Publisher | Princeton University Press |
Publish Date | September 17, 2019 |
Pages | 200 |
Language | English |
Type | |
EAN/UPC | 9780691195643 |
Dimensions | 8.1 X 5.0 X 0.9 inches | 0.7 pounds |
About the Author
Reviews
"[A reminder] of just how capable human beings are of remaking the world, when it suits them."---Rachel Riederer, New Yorker
"A soulful work of political theory. . . . Purdy believes that reckoning with climate change demands a deeper and more comprehensive overhaul of our infrastructure, and This Land Is Our Land is an invitation to imagine the new world--and the new society--that this overhaul could produce."---Eric Klinenberg, New York Review of Books
"A work of analytical and moral clarity."---Greg Grandin
"An urgent rallying cry for a planet and people in crisis. It is rich in ideas, shifting easily from radical miners' unions to the rise of the far right, from Thoreau's insights to the history of environmental regulation, but it is a work that remains consistently grounded in the land."---Adam Weymouth, Resurgent and Ecologist Magazine
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