Title: This radical land : a natural history of American dissent /
Authors: Miller, Daegan
Year: 2018
Subjects: Thoreau, Henry David,; Thoreau, Henry David,; Nature Effect of human beings on United States; Environmentalism United States; Environmentalism; Nature Effect of human beings on; United States
Abstract: "Daegan Miller is our guide on a beautifully written, revelatory trip across the continent during which we encounter radical thinkers, settlers, and artists who grounded their ideas of freedom, justice, and progress in the very landscapes around them, even as the runaway engine of capitalism sought to steamroll everything in its path. Here we meet Thoreau, the expert surveyor, drawing anticapitalist property maps. We visit a black antislavery community in the Adirondack wilderness of upstate New York. We discover how seemingly commercial photographs of the transcontinental railroad secretly sent subversive messages, and how a band of utopian anarchists among California's sequoias imagined a greener, freer future. At every turn, everyday radicals looked to landscape for the language of their dissent--drawing crucial early links between the environment and social justice, links we're still struggling to strengthen today." -- Publisher's description.
Contents: When the bough breaks -- Act one: at the boundary with Henry David Thoreau -- Act two: the geography of grace: home in the great northern wilderness -- Intermission -- Act three: revelator's progress: sun pictures of the thousand-mile tree -- Act four: possession in the land of sequoyah, General Sherman, and Karl Marx -- Enduring obligations.