This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth
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.

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This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth
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.

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This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth

This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth

by Jedediah Purdy
This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth

This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth

by Jedediah Purdy

Hardcover

$19.95 
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Overview

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

ISBN-13: 9780691195643
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Publication date: 09/17/2019
Pages: 200
Sales rank: 1,027,319
Product dimensions: 5.10(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Jedediah Purdy is professor of law at Columbia Law School. His previous books include After Nature, A Tolerable Anarchy, Being America, and For Common Things. He contributes to the New Yorker, the Nation, the New Republic, the Atlantic, n+1, and other magazines. He lives in New York City. Twitter @JedediahSPurdy

Table of Contents

Preface to the Paperback

On Contagion and Commonwealth vii

Preface to the First Edition

Homeland: The Search for a New Commonwealth xv

Acknowledgments xxxv

1 This Land Is Our Land 1

2 Reckonings 29

3 Losing a Country 55

4 The World We Have Built 76

5 The Long Environmental Justice Movement 102

Forward: The Value of Life 141

Index 151

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"A profound meditation for our heedless era."—Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

“A soulful work. . . . 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 reminder] of just how capable human beings are of remaking the world, when it suits them.”—Rachel Riederer, New Yorker

“A book to read now and to think from. . . . A call to action.”—Aaron Bady, The Nation

"This Land Is Our Land is a short book of great power by an exceptional writer and thinker. Challenging, dismaying, rigorous, inspiring, this is an urgent and important work about nature, land, and people for our Anthropocene moment."—Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland: A Deep Time Journey

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