This Land Is Our Land - by Jedediah Purdy (Paperback)

About the Book

A leading environmental thinker explores how people might begin to heal their 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.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

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

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 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,

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