Dark Emu is the history of Aboriginal Australia, before the white people came. As a settler here myself, I was astounded as chapter after chapter demolished the myth of Terra nullius and showed how comprehensively the landscape had been managed before invasion. The descriptions of the early colonialists had recorded the truth, and then it had ben buried.
I know some people who have had strong negative reactions to this work as well so it is controversial.
So you know, the author Bruce Pascoe is a Bunurong man and an award-winning Australian writer and editor. Dark Emu won the 2016 NSW Book of the Year and was a joint winner of the 2016 Indigenous Writer’s Prize.
History has portrayed Australia's First Peoples, the Aboriginals, as hunter-gatherers who lived on an empty, uncultivated land. History is wrong.
In this seminal book, Bruce Pascoe uncovers evidence that long before the arrival of white men, Aboriginal people across the continent were building dams and wells; planting, irrigating, and harvesting seeds, and then preserving the surplus and storing it in houses, sheds, or secure vessels; and creating elaborate cemeteries and manipulating the landscape. All of these behaviours were inconsistent with the hunter-gatherer tag, which turns out to have been a convenient lie that worked to justify dispossession.
I was a suburban kid in Knoxville, Tennessee and Dayton, Ohio and didn’t see much wrong with my neighborhood. As someone who then grew up to write and teach about the history of cities and city planning, I’ve long been struck by the mismatch between high-brow scorn for “suburbia” and the everyday experience of people who live in suburban communities. This short book is an effort to show how the world became suburban and what that meant to people in the different corners of the world—and maybe to put in a plug for my suburban Meadow Hills and College Hill neighborhoods.
Is a picture worth a thousand words? Urbanist Dolores Hayden sure thinks so, providing a cheeky, even snarky, guide to the worst aspects of the contemporary suburban landscape.
Brightly lit aerial photographs (many are from the American Southwest) show big box interchanges, lollipop subdivisions, tower farms for the electronic world, and all the other ways in which sprawl chews up the American land. Leaf through the pages, then you get to choose: Do you weep or do you scream in outrage?
A Field Guide to Sprawl was selected by the urban web site Planetizen for its list of "Top Ten Books in Urban Studies" and by Discover magazine for its list of "Top 20 Books in Science." Features on the book appeared in The New York Times and the Boston Globe.
Duck, ruburb, tower farm, big box, and pig-in-a-python are among the dozens of zany terms invented by real estate developers and designers today to characterize land-use practices and the physical elements of sprawl. Sprawl in the environment, based on the metaphor of a person spread out, is hard to define.…
When I studied urban economics at Princeton in the 1970s, theoretical models of urban form were all the rage. Political barriers to urban development such as zoning were dismissed as irrelevant. But as I read more about it, zoning appeared to be the foremost concern of both developers and community members. My service on the Hanover, New Hampshire zoning board made me appreciate why homeowners are so concerned about what happens in their neighborhood. NIMBYs—neighbors who cry “not in my backyard”—are not evil people; they are worried “homevoters” (owners who vote to protect their homes) who cannot diversify their oversized investment. Zoning reforms won’t succeed without addressing their anxieties.
Hirt’s title might make you think it is just about the United States, but her well-written book is one of the rare instances of an insightful comparison of zoning policies in the other high-income nations of the world. Zoning actually started in Germany in the late nineteenth century and was imported to the US at the beginning of the twentieth. It was seriously modified on our shores. Rather than orchestrating the orderly development of mixed-use neighborhoods, Americans isolated the single-family, owner-occupied house on a zoning pedestal that it rarely enjoys in other countries.
Why are American cities, suburbs, and towns so distinct? Compared to European cities, those in the United States are characterized by lower densities and greater distances; neat, geometric layouts; an abundance of green space; a greater level of social segregation reflected in space; and-perhaps most noticeably-a greater share of individual, single-family detached housing. In Zoned in the USA, Sonia A. Hirt argues that zoning laws are among the important but understudied reasons for the cross-continental differences.
Hirt shows that rather than being imported from Europe, U.S. municipal zoning law was in fact an institution that quickly developed its own, distinctly…
Research for my new
project has me digging into the crazed part of the American psyche, and this
has been the most compelling read thus far.
Quammen covers events in my own
backyard, so it was especially pertinent for me, but anyone interested in the
odiferous mix of religion, patriotism, and a nearly sociopathic self-centered
interest that is driving American politics will find this compelling.
Through
in-depth interviews and research, Quammen paints a vivid picture of the
reckless cowboys (both criminal and nominally law-enforcement) whose antics
reverberate across the society in the West. In addition, she delves deep into
the history of the Mormon religion that provides the backdrop for a
quintessentially American conflict.
"A deep, fascinating dive into a uniquely American brand of religious zealotry that poses a grave threat to our national parks, wilderness areas, wildlife sanctuaries, and other public lands. It also happens to be a delight to read." —JON KRAKAUER
American Zion is the story of the Bundy family, famous for their armed conflicts in the West. With an antagonism that goes back to the very first Mormons who fled the Midwest for the Great Basin, they hold a sense of entitlement that confronts both law and democracy. Today their cowboy confrontations threaten public lands, wild species, and American heritage.…
Why Vancouver? Yes, it's my hometown, but I've lived in other places for about 20 years of my life, and I'm anything but a thoughtless booster. Vancouver is a beautiful city, but it's a conflicted one between dreamers of its potential greatness, people wanting a laid-back West Coast lifestyle, and those for whom it's the end of the poverty road with the mildest climate in Canada. Thinking about it, painting it, and writing about it—it's an itch I have to scratch.
A unique work of visual storytelling using maps created by the author that trace the evolution of this place defined by a major river, a natural harbour, and a backdrop of snowcapped mountains, decade by decade from Indigenous times through the 1980s.
Each map has detailed notes focusing on changes and developments and a two-page spread of the key players of each period.
Absolutely unique in its presentational style, Vancouver: A Visual History is a delightful and important book. This stunning, full-colour historical atlas brings to life Vancouver’s first fourteen decades, beginning with a map of the 1850s depicting the land use, economy and settlement patterns of its first peoples, and ending with a map of the 1980s.
Using a repeating grid format, in which each ten-year period of the city’s history is examined through the application of the same criteria, each decade is introduced by a full-colour map that illustrates land use patterns. A column of text to the left of this…
I am a Somali scholar in the field of Somali Studies and African Studies, specialising in anthropology, history, and the politics of Somali society and state(s). I am recognised as an authority and expert on the historical and contemporary Somali conflicts in the Diaspora and back home. I am a Research Fellow at the Conflict Research Programme at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where I am tasked to study the political economy of Mogadishu. I am also a visiting professor at the African Leadership Centre, King’s College London, where I deliver lectures about the genesis of the Cold War in the Horn of Africa and the Civil War in Somalia.
I read this original and outstanding book long before I decided to join academia. It was almost a year before I embarked on my undergrad years. It was a memorable time of my life, as an exile in a small town, a suburban of Brussels, Belgium, to grasp the real causes of the state failure in Somalia. The authors brilliantly presented painful empirical research findings on land grabbing they had collected a few years before the collapse of the military regime in Somalia in 1991 which navigated a new route in research findings on the post-state collapse in Somalia that allowed me to look differently at the Somali conflict.
Despite massive international intervention, Somalia remains a land violently divided by class and cultural conflicts. Explanations for the civil war have generally focused on personalities, clan affiliations or Cold War competition, but this study examines issues of land and resources as important ingredients in Somali politics, and in the events that precipitated the civil war. Drawing on evidence of disputes over land rights and natural resources over several decades, the book aims to add a new dimension to the understanding of factional politics and ethnic/regional rivalries in Somalia.
I’ve been a biblical scholar for over 35 years and have spent a lot of time reading and writing academic volumes, analyzing arguments, and teaching diverse audiences. However, some of my formative experiences were as a child on my grandparents’ North Carolina farm, to which I still feel an almost elemental connection. Perhaps that farm (and my vegetable gardening) first sparked my interest in the environment. My interest turned to advocacy through research, which set me on the path to grasping the urgency of the climate crisis and my conviction that everything must reflect this reality. I’ve poured over the scientific reports (such as by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and read lots of nonfiction.
Davis beautifully shows how understanding the agrarian background of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament helps us recognize the radicality (and modern relevancy) of its vision for Earth. I was especially taken by her chapter on the Book of Leviticus, which usually gets “reduced” to a debate about same-gender-loving relationships.
In Davis’s hands, Leviticus’s guidelines about land and human bodies become amazingly applicable to modern ethics of eating and land use in an era of climate crisis. It really helped me appreciate that the habits we develop (even if they are experienced as rules) can actually change our minds and hearts.
This book examines the theology and ethics of land use, especially the practices of modern industrialized agriculture, in light of critical biblical exegesis. Nine interrelated essays explore the biblical writers' pervasive concern for the care of arable land against the background of the geography, social structures, and religious thought of ancient Israel. This approach consistently brings out neglected aspects of texts, both poetry and prose, that are central to Jewish and Christian traditions. Rather than seeking solutions from the past, Davis creates a conversation between ancient texts and contemporary agrarian writers; thus she provides a fresh perspective from which to…
I started studying public lands by accident in the 1990s for a class project before I really knew what they even were. Since then, I've published hundreds of thousands of words about them, including my latest book Making America’s Public Landswhere I’ve brought together much of what I’ve learned. I’m convinced the national forests, parks, rangelands, and refuges are among the most interesting and important experiments in democracy we have. I'm a writer, historian, and former college professor who now calls the Skagit Valley of Washington home. As much as I enjoy studying the public lands, I've appreciated hiking, sleeping, teaching, and noticing things in them even more.
This classic furnishes the best foundation for understanding land, water, and wildlife issues in the American West—and that necessarily means the public lands. Charles Wilkinson tacks from the past to the present, from law to history to ecology, effortlessly. What makes Crossing the Next Meridianso valuable is Wilkinson showing how nineteenth-century laws—the “lords of yesterday” in his apt phrasing—continued to guide the policy and politics around public lands and resources through the twentieth century. Packed with scholarship, legal reasoning, and on-the-ground reporting, Crossing the Next Meridian laid out clearly why the West I have lived in my whole life looks the way it does. Whenever I have a question about the history or law, this is my first stop. (I would love for him to issue an updated edition.)
In Crossing the Next Meridian, Charles F. Wilkinson, an expert on federal public lands, Native American issues, and the West's arcane water laws explains some of the core problems facing the American West now and in the years to come. He examines the outmoded ideas that pervade land use and resource allocation and argues that significant reform of Western law is needed to combat desertification and environmental decline, and to heal splintered communities.
Interweaving legal history with examples of present-day consequences of the laws, both intended and unintended, Wilkinson traces the origins and development of the laws and regulations that…
I started studying public lands by accident in the 1990s for a class project before I really knew what they even were. Since then, I've published hundreds of thousands of words about them, including my latest book Making America’s Public Landswhere I’ve brought together much of what I’ve learned. I’m convinced the national forests, parks, rangelands, and refuges are among the most interesting and important experiments in democracy we have. I'm a writer, historian, and former college professor who now calls the Skagit Valley of Washington home. As much as I enjoy studying the public lands, I've appreciated hiking, sleeping, teaching, and noticing things in them even more.
I suspect most people see much of the Great Basin—and Nevada specifically—as empty, uninteresting, and boring in its geographic features and history. I confess that I’ve been guilty of this. But in Leisl Carr Childers’s hands, I learned to recognize how full, fascinating, and insightful this place can be. She takes a key management idea that pervades public lands management—multiple use—and demonstrates what it means when the public and their representatives call for one stretch of land to be used for grazing and recreation and wildlife habitat and bombing ranges and mining and, seemingly, new things under the sun almost continuously. With a fragile ecosystem and a fractious political environment, Nevada offers many lessons that can only be taught when a careful writer digs as deeply as Carr Childers has. We’re lucky she rescued this place from relative obscurity.
The Great Basin, a stark and beautiful desert filled with sagebrush deserts and mountain ranges, is the epicenter for public lands conflicts. Arising out of the multiple, often incompatible uses created throughout the twentieth century, these struggles reveal the tension inherent within the multiple use concept, a management philosophy that promises equitable access to the region's resources and economic gain to those who live there.
Multiple use was originally conceived as a way to legitimize the historical use of public lands for grazing without precluding future uses, such as outdoor recreation, weapons development, and wildlife management. It was applied to…
I produced dozens of hours of film and television, including for Al Jazeera’s Emmy, Peabody, and DuPont-award-winning program Faultlines; as well as short and long-form documentaries for Democracy Now and teleSUR, and reporting in The New York Times and Washington Post. I’ve written two books based on my journalism, No More Heroes: Grassroots Responses to the Savior Mentality and Floodlines: Community and Resistance From Katrina to the Jena Six. I produced the independent feature film Chocolate Babies, which was recently added to the Criterion Collection. My latest film is Powerlands.
The best book I’ve ever read about organizing. Max Rameau is a visionary organizer who, in the midst of the housing crisis of 2008, began seizing empty houses and helping homeless people move in. In this book, he goes into deep detail on a previous campaign to reclaim land and turn it into housing, explaining both the successes and failures, as well as the strategy and ideas behind the tactics. Read this to learn the fundamentals of how to plan, organize and win.
On October 23, 2006, a group of activists brought land struggle to the US. After seizing public land in Liberty City, FL, the Umoja Village Shantytown was born.
