This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth Audiobook (Free)

Today, we are at a turning stage as we encounter ecological and political crises that are rooted in issues over the land itself. But these problems can be resolved if we attract on elements of our custom that move us toward a new commonwealth-a community founded on the well-being of all people and the natural world.

In the coalfields of Appalachia and the tobacco fields of the Carolinas to the public lands from the West, Jedediah Purdy-one of our finest writers and leading environmental thinkers- about This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a fresh Commonwealth shows the way the property has always united and divided Americans, holding us in keeping tasks and fates but also separating us into insiders and outsiders, owners and dependents, employees and bosses. Expropriated from Local Americans and changed by slave labor, the same property that represents a brief history of racism and exploitation could, in the face of environmental catastrophe, bind us together in romantic relationships of reciprocity and mutual responsibility.

This may seem idealistic inside our polarized time, but we are in a historical fork in the street, 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.