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

by Jedediah Purdy

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 explores how we might begin to heal our fractured and contentious relationship with the land and with each other.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691216799
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	05/18/2021
Pages:	200
Sales rank:	814,214
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Jedediah Purdy is a professor at Columbia Law School. His books include After Nature, A Tolerable Anarchy, Being America, and For Common Things. 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

Editorial Reviews

"This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth . . . is . . . about how to live together once we’ve accepted that there is nothing more “natural” than living in society with other human beings, in a world in which politics and ecology have come to be one and the same. It’s a book to read now and to think from. It’s a call to action."—-Aaron Bady, The Nation

"[A reminder] of just how capable human beings are of remaking the world, when it suits them."—-Rachel Riederer, New Yorker

"A work of analytical and moral clarity."—-Greg Grandin

"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

"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

From the Publisher