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

Written by Jedediah Purdy

Narrated by Timothy Andrés Pabon

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.



From the coalfields of Appalachia and the tobacco fields of the Carolinas to the public lands of the West, Jedediah Purdy—one of our finest writers and leading environmental thinkers—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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Sep 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9781515946861

Jedediah Purdy

Bonnie Honig is Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Modern Culture and Media (MCM) and Political Science at Brown University. In 2017–18, she served as inaugural Carl Cranor Phi Beta Kappa Scholar. An affiliate of the Digital Democracy Institute at Simon Fraser University and the American Bar Foundation, Chicago, her work in democratic and feminist theory studies the cultural politics of immigration (Democracy and the Foreigner, Princeton University Press, 2001), emergency (Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy, Princeton University Press, 2009), mourning (Antigone, Interrupted, Cambridge University Press, 2013) and refusal (A Feminist Theory of Refusal, Harvard University Press, 2021). Her book Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair (Fordham University Press, 2017) came out days after Trump’s 2017 inauguration, and her first piece of public writing about that presidency, “The President’s House Is Empty,” appeared on that inauguration day in the Boston Review. A collection of her public writing, Shell Shocked: Feminist Criticism after Trump, appeared with Fordham University Press in 2021. In 2023, her first book, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, was republished as a thirtieth-anniversary edition by Cornell University Press.

Reviews for This Land Is Our Land

[michael_lilly-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Excellent book explaining the need and basis for environmental justice. Purdy's writing style is tough to follow, but he is worth the trouble to read, and his style has become more readable over time.