This Land Is Our Land

The Struggle for a New Commonwealth

Jedediah Purdy

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Hardback

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English

Princeton University Press
25 November 2019

History of the Americas; Philosophy; Political science & theory; Environment law; Environmentalist thought & ideology

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.

By: Jedediah Purdy
Imprint: Princeton University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 203mm, Width: 127mm,
ISBN: 9780691195643
ISBN 10: 0691195641
Pages: 200
Publication Date: 25 November 2019
Audience: General/trade , Professional and scholarly , General/trade , ELT Advanced , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

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

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

[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, 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